It Takes

after Frank Stanford’s “The Brake”

The eden the Negro shows the country boy poet, so she knows
the look in his eye. She knows the crook of his hat, how it stalls in the mist night
where fireflies and hissing crickets move over fields. The Negro
knows watching, how much standstill is twill in prairie. Whatever brush
between the star and dirt. She knows lowland. Tamp down and seed. What
hunkers down between the plush dander and the country poet’s scythe. She has boots
without a sound to make. He has tree vision, the crawl of summer
bugs stuttering nameless. Unless the poet says cicada, think locust. Unless a poet
presses down a wing’s sod to crush thorax and antennae, think hay. Then the poet
the Negro, the country boy configure their horse and steady pistil behind standoff. Break
over pinball and dartboard and a bartender who makes bourbon barrel in a bath
where epithets infuse. How one might find a hick in the dark, like a frog, like
a white meat for bone and churn in her mouth against the stark row of evening to pulp.
Maybe they want one another’s head. They don’t know the difference, the growl insect
and how stirred its body, as if blossom, as if the ink creek of midnight speaks itself.