If they ask about the weather, say old men prophesy

from an ice ring that ghosts the moon,

seagulls scratching in sand, mackerel skies and mares’

tails. Say a wind from the south has sleet

in its mouth. Say heat lightning under the North Star

forecasts three days of uncombed rain.

Say you were baptized by windburn; a sunshower

in Lee County is the devil’s wedding.

Say geese tornado violently above the slough.

If they ask about distance, say neighbor,

father. Say barbed-wire fence bordering a hundred acres

of snap beans; say slaughter, goading

rams from pasture to the kill floor. Say the gash cleaved

from the ram’s thorax to flank. If they ask

about fire, say the doublewide burned to its cinderblocks

in Utopia Park; say bathtub meth, how

the grounds reeked of ammonia before flames aproned

the trailer. Say a half-gallon of diesel

to scorch the ditches, fuels to burn back the timberline.

Say the chicories flower sapphire, cobalt

where flames clung to brush the longest. Say there’s more

to ash than scatter. If they ask about misery,

say Cynthia Johnson fell in love first, say her boyfriend

plunged a screwdriver into her chest

having extinguished a twelve-pack of Schlitz, free based

crystal from a light-bulb pipe. Say the black

tongue of Highway 61 where white-cross roadside markers

litter its hairpin curves. Say the rawboned

high school blonde in the backseat of your parents’ Buick,

how her sex smelled of wet soil, wild

mushrooms; how for hours you carried those smells

in the hinges of your knuckles. If they ask

about grief, say a dozen barn owls latched to the rafters

means another hard winter. Say steam lifts

as ponds unlock last week’s freeze. Say berries of ice

jeweled in the horse’s mane.