A faint mural lies on the
sandstone, sun-warmed, against
which men press their foreheads.
They, or, to be honest, we, search
for alcoves into which a little note
might have been coiled up and
slid, might be waiting for us still,
saying,
in last century’s italic hand, you
were always the one I wanted or
maybe just you were not entirely
unnoticed. We use longing like
radar, to find the way.
The smell of minerals in hose water
steals over the fence like comfort, a
faint echo of childhood when, before the
mailed mortgage scams and clink of ice
cubes bleeding into scotch, one would
jump through the sprinkler’s fantail and
land in the cool wet grass. The lawn is
coming back to life, having died in
strange patches that suggested, if you
didn’t look closely, glyphs from an old
sacred text with their own
incomprehensible pull