Tinged with Red Neon Clouds Drift in from the Coast

Here is a story: A teacher invites students to his house where his wife lies in bed
in the front room, paralyzed. He never mentions her, and neither do the students 
as they step quietly near the body. Following a dusty yellow path

downhill past a water tank and its obsidian surface, a rat-rattling barn, 
and all the high pale grass with its dry rasp that may be lizard or wind 
yet all walk faster

to the creek where small trees are moss-grimed. Where lichen scabs bark. 
Where brown water flows cold over gold stones, where the horsetail, green 
anachronism, clouds the opposite bank, where they cross on fat white rocks, 
come to the fallen redwood, the base as tall as three, its spindly, mudcaked,
erotic roots. Here is a story: A dancer watching her performance on film—
My enemy is time. Here the rain penetrates

and earth gives up hardness, lets go of roots and the tree in its entire being 
accedes to the inevitability of dirt, yields to the shudder and fall. So memory 
saturates and who survives her story? Though in the end it doesn’t matter 
whether you are the body celebrated or forgotten the creek flows 
with a sandy accumulation of big trees

casual dust. And all night rain with its hurried thrum and spit. You’re 
wine-soused, dinner offering some illusion of others except the night 
knows better and you wake with a heart full of dread. This isn’t poetry

that hustle and sigh. Listening is hard work, the rain with its morse code
antique communicator

the something being told, lying beyond seeming-to-know, 
some whisper, promise, release. Ss-ss the rain’s admonitory, 
fingertip tapping.

The wet leaves fluttering with importance. Heave and turn 
these messages of night, another coast, and your
Irrefutable body.

Originally appeared in Third Coast