My classmates straighten and fall
quiet in their chairs, ready to go
home, their fingers interlocked

At Christmastime in sixth grade I gave out
three dozen Berol Black Warrior pencils,

shrubs so petal heavy
their limbs swim in the light
                                                            wind

Like everything else they are
like nothing else—

Is it always each color dirty its own way?

This says less about the road, or baths, or loss,
than it does about movement, how still a road

but regardless of how the Dowds have gone
none imagined being twice bereft,

he wouldn’t sell his soul to pay tuition,
instead he was a poet on a mission

I know how they lived; how they mulled it,
baked it, took it for communion

The cornfields didn’t covet buttons yet;
No ghost crouched in the cedar chest,