American Studies

                  for Emily Dickinson

Pick the one who knows white horses
she said
as one might escalate the drizzle
& the bend of Mexico’s coast
towards the nearly sublime
sand & asphalt alleyway
that wanders between the winds
of wolves & men…I woke up speaking
Spanish with a lisp
to the shadow of a French girl
in Hanoi’s red-light district in my mind
I pointed left & walked hard right
there were darker places to go to
I thought, but Cleveland wasn’t
one of them & I ended up
in Pittsburgh where I had a son
& three reasons to stop cleaning my
rifle (plus two more reasons that
I kept secret & a old pick-up
truck I drove all the way to
Jackson, Wyoming in a snowstorm
so white it bent glass into an awkward
silence I never did figure out
how to break

-by Michael Price & Kevin Opstedal