Middle Man
They asked me to teach Beginning
English on the seventh day of trapped

men in a mine. Cameras built like quarter-
mile snakes show only conveyor belts

and a red toolbag. The clearance is five
feet and the air like that in the nose

of a plane; the thinness and coldness
and alien darkness either terrify them

or crawl without sound over their teeth.
In four days the rescue will reach the captive

amber space, and I will offer the word
conjugate like the serpentine camera

through 400 meters of rock, both of us
blinking, peering, wanting only to be

transmitters of hope, middle-men
in someone’s desire simply to be seen.

Cover Me
she said and then
ran with the trowel
from where I was bent
over the tomato plants

as if her dash
to the fertilizer
was in Vietnam for ammo
or during a bank robbery
for a hostage

and not on an ordinary
Sunday afternoon
with snipers no more deadly
than neighbors shooting
looks at the crazy woman

bent at the waist
and holding a trowel
I bought for two dollars
as if it had a fuse.

Sentinels
Yesterday she bought a bucket and filled it with nails
pulled from the hooves of horses that had died on her father’s farm.

They were not killed simultaneously, but ruined in vibrant
increments of affection, the big bay with cancer

groping for the lightswitch in the dark of its bones,
the pinto with the heart too small to support the Noah’s ark

of its ribcage, the appaloosa with a broken foot
and the subsequent bullet from Daddy’s gun. So many tears,

so many visits from the vet, so many motions of the forklift
as it hoisted the corpses to a blue tarp on the back of a truck.

She carries this payload in a pail she bought in town,
stopping at the roots of a sycamore in which her little brother

builds his Fort Apache. The tree overlooks the pasture, the mare’s
new colt testing gravity with legs hinged like uncertain scissors.

She hands the pail to her brother when he asks, and he makes
the nails part of his watchtower walls, standing guard over it all.