This poem begins where the ditch forgets its name—
becomes creek and then river. Begins
in the soft shush of a compressor’s next breath,
in the crawlspace crack beneath this very brick apartment.

It wears no gold. Carries no saint’s remains.
It’s the wild onion stench on a spill of bent clover,
this poem that blooms where the ditch forgets its name.

It won’t come out in clean light. Prefers the lies
told by glow on a nicotine-stained sheet
while, outside, the ditch forgets its own name.

It maps what wants buried:
there is oxygen’s next complaint,
here is the rosebush grown, over–flowering
still in a tangled bramble
outside this very brick apartment.

The poem holds the silence of a shuttered country store
at midnight,
faint as hymn from a shuttered church. Holds still
where the ditch’s throat
forgets its name. Holds the crack.
Creates the frame.
Forgets its name.