Portrait with Smeared Centuries

I begin the day like any other day: a decade staring back in the rearview mirror of the wrecked pickup truck: you standing so tall you’re already headless: until I turn around the cornfield blurs into the torn edges of an atlas: pull your hands out from under me to anoint this god- given country of yours: mottled bones singing the anthem of a star- spangled nation: this land given enough time to list its own possibilities: atrocities like a blade of dusk resting on my throat, I bruise: by standing I practice the sacred: & kneel how the body was built toward the bottomless insides of ghosts: the small of my back the sacrum: they say, the five disciples with pocked faces unlike your self-inflicted gunshot but a single entryway: an emptiness full of faith:rise to me as only you would after god has left you with these entrance wounds with no way out: the purpling field that goes on & on: recognizable as a heartbeat: a century- long orbit around a cage of stained glass: broken, you gather me in your image of failed flesh: piecing mirror after mirror back together through the night until nobody forgets: one hundred years of this landscape behind & before us continues to stir — even if the earth under our knees, under every American sky, had been turning west- ward for centuries.