Some pets, Horace says, spend their lives
going over the same old ground: some suburb
      of love. A parking lot
      at the shopping mall of loss.

My river, wind-hammered into a silver tray,
bears a tumbleweed past the nuclear reactors.
      Past my parents’s house,
      my heart has turned to dust.

I am five again, what have I done to myself?
The doctor setting my broken wrist on Sunday
      was the county coroner.
      Over the helium balloon,