The woods are beaten jagged.
Wind snapped saplings
at mid-trunk—hundreds,
as thick as my thigh—and
flung them. An out-of-season
thunderstorm, and the road
to the dam gleams in the dove-
and-pearl, born-again morning,
broken wood polished
by breaking, as if belief
were an easy matter of the will.
Ahead, a meeting of realists —
a turkey buzzard, tented
over a flattened skunk,
shrugs into the purified air
at my approach, talons
swinging a red length of gut
that the skunk no longer needs.
