Antennae lie buried beneath the floor because the reception is better that way. The airwaves brought us crumbs and pocket change but nothing worth diving in for. We learned whoever pounds the rock makes fire, and whoever plows the flame grows their own flaw. Instinct rode us down, looted our conversation, kept us in our seats. That's why we cannot listen to these unwrapped winds and murmurs.

It's dark now. It was dark when we started out. The moon is a crooked tooth buried in the sky's smoke stained roof. Over time you changed my system and now I feel like something northern has happened to us.

They've left me some taste of mental health. Up in the old hat factory a miniature horse circles a track. Final exams are held between laps; that's when they test our spoiled grey faces for muscular decisions. We learn how to hold our ass in place, to shake nickels into dimes. A routine physical disclosed how I had been screwed up by savage cooking, the kind done with pencils and safety pins.

I titled her the same way she authored me -- with bitten facts dealt like marked cards. She raked back her hair so she could bend to her task, and that's when I felt left out. The forecast called for black ice and dark coughs. An army of starlings broke ranks when some dust blew down from the hills. She was waving from the porch but I stayed clean in a rented van.

The paper that cut me was white bond. The fair and chiseled marble remains visible in the way she conjugates her nerves like Henry James. Behind the gas tanks, underneath the carnival tent, or any place where temperature accumulates, a gorgeous pinch of cypress leaves can be hidden. I am summoned by their scent. Out there in the blood thick mist, a cicada drones. Or is it the arrival of my gift of mourning tongues?