Lost Fields
He was hunted by many. Not least of which the police. We were cleaning when he left, methamphetamine’s very priest of invisibility belief. Sheet draped over barrel, pillow hugged against stock. We watched him go, our sponges frozen on walls.
And Lost Fields is the land of close hills, live oaks heat stricken, mobile homes tucked in hollows, narrow combs shallow but steep-sided and fished in haunting hours. The road is a blind passerby of county neglect. He could have gone anywhere. He could have crouched behind the well-kept and unused church in Bangor, stretched out in some fallow’s toil in Honcut, climbed as high as the lakes and unsurveyed boundaries where summer’s brown dehydration crosses to breathless pines.
They stand guard over
silence and shade. Animals
hide, instinct’s fear eye.
