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Fladry
I am weak and edible. Some human quality stays weird, alien to the wild, outsiders, bad sport with spooky habits not just fladry— other enchantments against order, house paint, yard art, border fences and the tunnels under borders, the amen, the wedding ring, the flavored condom. The wolves are back. I've seen them, seen the fladry ranchers tie, red flags' flutter to puzzle or annoy, folk-work tendered back from wood-shadow, more each year, abjured with clover. What I like most about the first shot of bourbon is how it feels like letting go of a grudge. In the dream, I kill my friend and bury him lime in the church basement between sump pump and broken fireplace. On my knees I tile red stone back to mosaic. Soldiers beat me up and called me names in my own language, this one, the one Whitman used to soothe the dying, limbless, the bleeding, the infected. Beat me with fists slight more stone than the shape that holds this pencil. A house is held together by shapes. And yet in the ongoing negotiations between the world where I hold my son and famine, bombings, hate, prosperity— two notes, octaves apart attenuate what's hidden inside your body to the invisible. It might help remembering shadows and not hours. Infinity also has the contour of a children's game. Infants remember fladry, safe in the car seat grasping, grasping. Some forces are enormous and move against you, and when you pretend they aren't there, surge. Some swing on a hinge which at night sounds like don't look back, don't look back. Anyone can tie fladry. See it out riding. I go out at French-horn dawn, boots in mud, string fladry at intervals, each tongue labeling the field, calling beyond language. And if fladry bears the conditions of a spell, redness of the flag, the measure between them, it's flapping which charms the wolf away, for a term. Warnings to keep the flock from the wolf's belly. Messages for ourselves. See it from there, turn overall and plaid flannel; we would tear our own fur to cross these lines.