Where have I left the least of these things, broken pots in which nothing bloomed,   half-sung songs with words that drained away? I might have known more depth unlike the stream that overflowed its bounds in mockery of providence. Death ignites the country; the air smells of char.  I wish peace to an old neighbor   who feeds foxes in the yard, flicking deer ticks from a hem, mouth a bitter row.    The clangor of that lane succumbs to a fall of yellow leaves; graves she showed me, last year’s fragile bones, were sunk in a deeper profundity. States with internecine wars, statues without heads: I have not stopped to visit twice nor anywhere   humans live.  If we looked beneath soil’s skin, would we find whole villages of sightless eyes, the lacrimal bone small as a fingernail.  In my neighbor’s field,    five bits of meteor fell from the sky, hard stuff of the universe.

CAROL ALEXANDER’s latest book is Environments (Dos Madres Press). Her work appears  in journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, The Canary, Chiron Review, The Common, Cumberland River Review, Denver Quarterly,  Hamilton Stone Review,  Pif, One, Poetrybay, Southern Humanities Review, Sweet Tree Review, The New Verse News, The Seattle Review of Books and Third Wednesday.