Wagon in which I have never ridden. Junket of salt—my family rolled in a spume of dust. There was a
rock then a wheel. There was a river then a road. Air escaped and we hissed down. Settlement.

Here next to the river, released in a brume of sweat, the soul deepening our color, withdrawn. Whisking
around like a sheet on the line or an apron at a waist imprinted with turmeric—two green hands.

Cupboard that won’t quite shut. The soul supped through a dandelion stem. If we could blot ourselves
on the well-worn cloth spread out like a map, feel the soul on an early June day blowing steady from
the east.

Oh, such an American, you think. Just north from where Akron spun out its doughnuts of tread. In the
east, steel stamping plants in the valley.

Carpet runners of petroleum now but then animal fiber, forest floor. Catching rabbits. Tents of leaves.

Something like a rock out of the sky, an axe, a hatchet falling cleaver side down. That’s not the soul.
Something like a clock. Unwieldy pendulum. Fist of shale, tuber of feldspar, clay clot.