Cecily Parks

HOW FROM POLITENESS TO THE TREES

Solstice dabbles behind the hills, whitefire at the horizon well into what should be evening, well into after, meting out to what should be the privacy of night illumination enough to fray the sky.

Black wings snuff out the owlish air in the cottonwood’s elephant silhouette, readying a backlit section of branches for the wind’s beckoning, the shush of each restacking wing not an endearment exactly, but close.

The one track mind combs the mown meadow for the word bristling beneath cut tongues of grass, which is the word of the scavenging animal whose prayer is most like the light’s gestures on the seventh longest day of the century’s seventh year, which undo themselves expertly.

Lightning precedes thunder the way the river precedes stone through untrammeled channels of interface, visitors and visiteds and the rain, pricking.

To the voice that calls in the woods, Come back, I’ll throw the stone you whimpered for, the animal demurs, is perfection, is diminishing, does not pause to look back.

This earth-in-paragraph recovers its fathomlessness subsequent to jackknifing grass.

OUR DESPISED AND UNHISTORIC WEST

Taxidermy could make an animal less desirable than right before the bullet, but wanting is like that, reflective fruit. For instance, if you arrive at the Occidental Hotel without baggage, you must pay first. Where else is lack worth ponying up for, and does that place have such heaviness to its curtains? Above the sticky radio, in the dust the ceiling fan threshes, a calligraphic constellation: Oh Oh Oh. Miss Petticoats, her lace as fine as lead in a decanter, pines on the fainting couch that velvetly begets the posture and sound of pining, each carnivorous syllable as small as a chapel in a town near a town named Buffalo. So much ardor in this interior, and though the hotel hallways may be narrow and dark, they are nothing if not long.

ONE COULD PEACH

One could basket

in the brush, larrup

what surpasses the ankles,

bushwhacking like a fixed

gear bicycle in church.

One could princess, kissy

kissy until the sock puppet’s face

is dirty. Little lamb

and bleach to sugar the rest

of the body.

One could shallow

in the swaybacked river,

hem and knee, fast and west,

lone a little longer.

One could mercy, mercy, mercy

high-pitched in the sink.

One could worthless, pack

the hamper full of white-tailed hawks

and forget the dresser’s top drawer.

One could before and after

soft as a window.

One could wildly easier.

One could word ascension

in place of the face-shaped stone’s

sweet approximation

of mouth.