For V

The clouds are flaking embers again, evergreens
spraining their necks. Words reach my tongue
and hatch into a swarm of robber flies. They wilt
and crumble in the Holocene sun as it sets within me.
Parking lot mountain range of snow, an orangely-lavender contrail
that floats like an opposite spirit above a telephone wire. And there,
the motionless black outline of a lone kestrel, too late now for it to
think of love or hunger, only waiting for a distant gunshot to pull it from
this scene—this pine resin gloaming, this pink champagne death rattle.
Dusk sutures the horizon, violent and salacious. Sodium arcs push us back
into the middle road of our own shadows. We were never really here.