Your wood pile, Mike Renz,
is an L-shaped windbreak,
strategically placed between logs
for a meadow vole’s repose,
an opossum’s, or a skunk’s. Coyotes
and crows flop down, dream of foxfire
and whatever feasts on wisteria, thistles
and goldenrod – anything as mischievous
as green corkscrew curls, the season’s hi-
jinxes squirming like a bait ball across the lawn,
collapsing in the swale. Someone’s emptied
the bingo drum right here in your back yard,
stoked the season, said that divination’s dead –
there’s only convulsion in the way that melodies
bleed from scales. They are coming now,
the fulsome endowments, the dynastic
racketeers speaking in the grammar
of castaways – wrong-footed,
who’s to say, they’re coming anyway –
the infantry, this rash remix of clover,
snakes and bees, the careless grandiosity
of your wood pile, Mike Renz.