DIRGE

Summer, keep me in your cellar.
Pick a peck of me. Pack me in salt
caper, okra, and artichoke. Throw in
the sun with the pickled egg yolks.
Stave off the freeze and the cyclic little deaths
with slow swigs of long light
and sweet body, sweat body, bare body jam.
Seal me in a mason jar and I will be
your ugly buzzing orchestra, your broken night-
light, a saved-up firefly that lasts.

VOLTAGE

Macon, Georgia, at the end of July,
Aunt Betsy died barefoot,
wet palmed, beside the black
of a cast–iron lamp. Bad circuits.

In our house, a voice through a wire,
bodiless at an impossible hour.

So we got on a plane. Below us
a current of lights
spreading out and spreading out.