Antilocapra americana

I’ve perched me on the paling blue crescent
of a backyard swing, slack and dubious,
pill-capsule moon on its drop in the air.

By pitiless grist, the drought years clouding
at the scuff of my heel wind silt-spires, stirred
to an ekphrasis, pity, of water.

But sat on this swing, dandling the apple
of memory—reddish and rot-soft, poor
and euphoric in the pink of my hand—

I’m almost a boy, pointing: the prairie
since pieced away to houses, ricked with ribs
of timber, tacked up, so many matchsticks

bunched in the tinder grass. The antelope
in a shimmer of limbs are vanishing,
hoof by breeze-soft hoof, taking their places

at the outer spiral; the slow shades ring
hell’s vestibule, one herd circling under
a home I’ve scarcely spit enough to hate.