It’s late fishing season
and the Day of the Dead

when everything out there
waits for me

in the forbidden territory
of skin and memory,

a bent line
of a Sam Shepard play

rocking me in the dark,

and the telephone pole
outside the window
turns into

a skeleton.

I’m trying to beat my way
past storm clouds that build
in the west

and ghosts.

I need to remember
what I can’t remember

what you said

between skillets of trout
and dust-motes floating
in the cabin

where we made
our second son.

It could be
a song
that wades the river now

a song hanging in the wind,
its lyrics sung by the pines

in the dark
its laughter and fishes

fried up on the old stove,
where you loom
at the edge of evening.