The lyric moment
holds time still,
recreates the circumstances
so we can interrupt,
a time to creature a world together
where guns are melted to make shovels.

Or explore the city
with no money and no phone, as a way
to go beyond the neighborhood,
the rhythm of walking
an action poem.

Or concoct a thought experiment investigating
the poet’s white Michigan hometown.

Or sing a little field holler,
digging dirt in the Mississippi Delta to raise levees,
The mules worked themselves to death
with those songs in their ears.

Or ponder a 12,000-year-old beech wood in Australia,
a witness tree, a wolf tree alone in a field,
left over from a previous ecology.

Poems can make arguments.
They can trouble the line.
We go out wolfing in Kentucky.