Blue streetlight on the snow-limned trees like butaned rocksalt,

on the post office & bar, on the red brick buildings

with plywood lidded over their windows,

& lightless houses with letters nailed

to their doors-

the doors like bulletin boards, making demands of the missing-

but the flesh that is kin to light & grass & wing

is nowhere on the smalltown street.

Third poorest county in the U.S., by last measure, by best guess,

but it could be anywhere, it could be a hundred towns in the Midwest

with two places open, & neither a grocery store,

where old trucks sit in driveways, heavy enough to bookend

the Book of the Dead, Midwest edition.

And luck's rare as a three-legged cat,

like the one that Higgs bosons its way each evening

through the deer-picked garden

next door, little shadow, little hopalong shadow,

if I didn't have bad luck I'd have no luck at all.

Foxrare like gold dust,

scarce as you, Old Ghost,

as sunshine after sundown, the golden capillaries of a wounded body

we never see, an aortic elsewhere, but one that passes through us-

like rain through the earth, through the ribs of the dead,

this unseen body,

body of muons & neutrinos, Old Ghost, someday

the wounds will put our doubts to rest. …