like a room with an open window, we

were haunted:

neither exit nor entrance,

fully: so the ghosts crossed our thresholds:

they have all gone out, they have all gone in:

the little houses leaning into the field of grass, the water

tower levitating into the sky, the roadside drill

that digs in the grit:

shock of the human

machine

continuously beating but irregularly: so absence

fills with expectation, overfills: and the thing is

king:

The Idol and the Icon

no telling what lies on the other side:

the X and its door:

the wayfarer arrives at the throne

at the end of the world

to find that the throne is a cardboard sign

scrawled in black marker:

(I thirst):

no one, nowhere: no “look no further”:

though the boy

waves his bottle over his head, walks the highway

shirtless on the shoulder, the last

of his water beading against clear

empty plastic, and visible

from the car as we drove by. In the worst

heat of the day.

In the desert not far from the border.

So, the X

and its exits, the many passages since. So to have gone further

out of the way—to have not been so sensible—

so that the walker,

watched sometimes, secretly, from the givenness, the order,

of conditions that now still make their

appearances known

—and utmost—wouldn’t be alone: here is water

left on the roadside

with the carrion,

and the cars that cross leftward, inex

-tricable from the broken line: