~ After Louise Bourgeois (1999)
There is an outline in chalk on the pavement.
At the intersection, a car with its engine still running.
A pool of red matches the red of an overturned plastic chair.
There is a cardboard sign crudely lettered.
The hands of the freshly dead are silver with tape.
Two holes in the spine, two through the forehead, one through the heart.
Mangy dogs sniffing through mangled grass.
Nothing but the smell of darkness and dying.
Wakes held beneath the street lights’ yellow flares.
Sorrow and dread pick through a wreck of roadways.
Rain falling through a rusted basketball hoop.
The silence of thousands on thousands of graves.
And death not yet done riding through the countryside.