Steubenville (for Troy Surloff)

There is also this thing where

the summer before I was born

in a field just northwest of the junction

of routes 22 and 7, the sunlight fell

with an audible hiss on the fallow

reeds and hollow stalks of straw.

Inconclusive tools round out the nut,

strip the screws and crossthread the bolts

that hold us suspended in our own time.

I dropped out, felt the pleasure of a vacuum

in a gap where the world once pressed

heavily down on creaking bones that bore

its cankered and pus-wet weight.

The dog licks the bowl, the Ohio River

a runt, backwashes into road ditch and

septic field where the dead won’t lie long

enough to rot. We talk more, and hear

voices from the field through the dark,

walk toward them on soft-tipped fingers

but know the history, have tripped the traces

& finally lie back down, to wait for dawn again.