Two of the tires are gone.
The car tilts like a dog’s
head deaf to human wish,
and in the dirty shadow
of the car’s undercarriage
a license plate of a sunset
airbrushed and scratched,
little lacerating horizons:
out back a ping pong table
is going, its sagging net
trying to move as the wind
passes through it. A cloudy
Ziploc bag with a TV remote
inside is screwed to a sheet
of plywood half-warped
and cracked against a tree.
In the weeds a yellow jacket
soaks in motor oil that’s drifted
to one side of a pie-pan,
which has a welt in the middle
as if a child’s fist had made it:
an oily bug shines like chrome
as it scurries up a blade of grass
and I burst it between my fingers.
Long before today, in this house,
I crawled under a wicker table
searching for a pill stamped
with a dove that wasn’t there.
Fixed in the table’s center
was a wide pane of glass and
those around the table watched
as if I were a fish beneath
a glass-bottom boat, engine
cut, no one making a sound.
