When we were alone, I knew what family was:
a pre-storm sea, an attic with its windows yawned

open, curtains like dove’s hands holding me,
pulling west. Teamster me home, ghost horses.

I have a funeral to crash. I have a plane to catch,
I have a sedan hurdling through black air to embrace.

This was the house built inside another house; its basement flooded
every springtime, the water pump with ruddy air alluvial, promising

your pelvis and mine will be pulverized and found together, connected
in threads, like semen in riverwater, yours the sedan and mine mid-flight

callings, remembering God only to wish well, the deep place
to draw from, to brick over when grandkids are born,

your hair grown long and mine shored. Time will bend for us.
We can stow away in furs, we can sharpen our teeth,

we can paint by greaselight and speak Munsee Algic.
Why not shape words as steam columns, or oil wells, firestarting?

What America has is Land, nothing else. Find me a bullet
or an arrowhead. I will polish them clean.