Ragged jagged overgrown fields of steroid
ragweed drowning out the state flower, golden-
           rod;  like everyone else he was letting

everything go, even the usually mown bottoms
gone to wingstem and ironweed; it’s a bold
           behold coming down the sledding hill

in dawn’s excited light, they held on to the runaway
Deere, somehow already hurt by the pressing fade
           of these fall ephemerals 

who next year will have a different life,
competing with honeysuckle, multiflora rose, wild
           grape vine and voracious locust saplings;

in the dark shade of sudden woods where light receds,
the open sea of grass will know its barrenness,
           will come into the bitter days of weightless being.

He has run his race and lost forever those coyote nights:
love making, howling at moon hidden behind circus clouds,
           the trapeze swing into another body, the ethereal 

penetration of nightly vales giving way to morning
vapors when the itch of intercourse is luminously
           revealed in the ugly whelps of their alfalfa romp.

The surcease, at first unbearable, a low numbness,
became his litany of what their holy acts meant, repeated
           on his grandmother’s decades old rosary beads;

sex as the anointed drama of his life, the top & bottom
of his extinction, the extension ladder into the heaven
           of her perfect invitation, her sweet Honey flow,

the ecstasy of exploring every contour earth could hold,
the memory being on the ground looking up into her eyes
           that are nothing like the sun, and afterwards

a distance in her words and what they mean.
She’s a raptor going for the prey of her life, and he
           a drama coach with year after year of bloodless

Hamlets, a director without direction, vulnerable to her
eagle claws. She sank in & rode him like a god-damned rodeo