Adam Means Red Earth

There is nothing to eat,
                   seek it where you will,
                                      but of the body of the Lord.
—William Carlos Williams
 
Outside Sweetwater, bones roast
into rosy clay. Plains sweep past 
the freeway like unleavened bread.
Butchers conjure dark eucharists,
Herefords slaughtered for steak wafers.
 
The pickup’s tire ruptures, swerving
head-on to the opposite lane.
The charcoal-blackened wreck kindles
flames smelting plastic to steel,
a smore of death, boiling marrow.
 
Jackrabbits listen with ladling ears
the whistle of big rig trailers,
headlights coiling through darkness,
a tortilla moon baked in night’s griddle
of stars. The police processed 
 
nine killed, most in their twenties.
Their parents’ eyelashes are tear-thickened wicks.
A mile off the highway, crickets carol
in a crumbled adobe chapel,
fiddling legs in parched fonts
 
where holy water pooled. The dead
pierce the living’s dreams, ghosts
steamed through air vents, their kingdom
made from memory and earth.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.