Your Hands on This Rail
Your hands on this rail poised like a pianist’s are birds in the slow movies my father shot with his Super 8, jays that live now only on film, hanging forever in the breezes of the ’80s, the dust of those summers that stuck in my mouth like the retainer I’d pluck out to point at girls on the playground, a disembodied organ, pink as sex, alive as the moths I cupped in my hands, the pulses and smudges they left with me, their ashy vanishings into that pasture in Iowa, full of cricket fire, that held my house and the day in my twenties you lay on my bed, peeled off your socks, lifted your throat up to me, the image of your skin folding in and in me where it is still coiled, like a reel of film, waiting to be threaded through light.