As a God-struck child kneeling at the rail, 
I believed more easily then 
I saw the dove descending 

to be fascicled in bread, 
but then my eye grew inured, 
and the Spirit did not visit. 

Today, the snow fell differently,
and I untangled from the clapboard house
to feed the birds,

as ravenous as they
for the last red berries of pyracantha;
or was it the color

of their bodies against
the patches of snow
that pulled me toward them—

a red, bluer and more dull
than Castilian red or carmine—
the color of fall apples 

cupped in a porcelain lotus.
I saw first gate, then palace,
then the legendary halls
	
appeared, shimmer in the sun.
Draped in diadem, 
the Spirit hovered—unheavened, 

homed in spalls of ice, trees rimed
with last year’s fruit on straight, flagless stems, 
semiquavers become quarter notes—

the sweet, shriven juice of all frost’s shrivings—
fleet, brief—
suddenly made radiant.
                        

It’s just a Thursday night in the flatlands of America. 
He sits down and orders an Old Fashioned. Clam rolls, 
all you can eat. He tells the waitress that his brother 
owns a restaurant in West Liberty. The brother’s hiring.
He says that he wants to talk about it more but in another 
place. Not this HoJo’s. He’ll wait for her until her end of shift. 
He’ll take her in his semi to the bar across the interstate.
His cab is warm, and the engine never stops 
running. He worries the cherry in his drink. She glances at his hands:
not the hands of a man in a clean business, black crescents of motor oil 
beneath his nails.  She meets him in the hallway outside 
the restaurant where some turn left, some right. 
Such a simple decision, which way to go. He tells her she needs to go
with him. The sun is still out.  It’s summer. She vacates her body. 
Her TV doppelganger tells him politely that she will drive
in her own car.  She crosses the interstate, and waits, 
but he never shows. A light dusting of leaves on the pavement:
a preternatural fall before true autumn: the hard, rutted ground 
with its cropped stubble where he might have thrown her down,
but he’s long gone. His semi skims the highways, the susurrus 
of tires on wet pavement. For years it haunts her, as she passes 
every boarded-up façade, in every dying town, where there’s nowhere 
to go, not even for a spot of coffee. It haunts her, the missing eye 
of that derelict bar, two towns over, gutted out. Dead, alive, 
it’s where she might have worked had she turned left instead of right.