Fresh flowers are fleeting
and white near my grandfather's house:

carnations. To act courageous,
any act or any struggle

must be entered unwillingly and thus
this daughter named Wakefield—

she is no heroine of mine, least not
in a tale such as we have here

when matter, what is densest
huddles naked, rattling in car

that is conducted by windpipe.
The journey is the travel and my mouth

is a gas tank. Elsewhere,
love is always grasping, but in Wakefield

my ankles creak on a porch with no steps
and years pass through as the bones

walk down my body. My soul has settled
here on an Indian burial ground

and here my arms first wrapped around
a pretty Canadian girl from Indiana.                                      

And here the whole house on Harrison Street
warms like a kettle with steam up in the kitchen

and outside the petals pall.

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