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,