— farthest south

The clouds’ shadows climb these central mountains,
like an echinoderm smothering a bulge of muscles.

Appalachia is a bed.

Feeling her adjust carefully under my weight 
and then relax, becoming somehow longer and lighter,

she forms her shape to mine with little effort,
twining her legs around
when my mouth attaches to her neck like a little cup.

I must have twenty arms.

The slip, white belly of a bird 
must feel like its own bed, 
an overturned pillow, windswept 
and cool, clean and drifting off 
to another hour, half known, 
climate of plain light.

The damp coil of her hair
pressed against my shoulder after a night-
shift, feels like an ache I cannot stretch.

The slit of the morning curtain,
the slow oscillation of the whirring fan.

I was flying again, out over the Point,
and this time I almost got to land.

My grandfather spent most of his life here
beached on the couch, TV so loud I remember 
the vibrations in my chest, the rumbling in the floor
whenever there was a low voice on the set.

And now, behind glass, a coyote and a snowshoe hare,
stuffed and mounted as though the coyote were to blame,
the hare hanging pearl and plush in its mouth,
“it ran so quiet on the snow it was like a ghost.”