Entelechy, Nebraska

House cat on the highway, I know you’re dead,

but had you just started your way across

or were you almost there? It makes all the difference to me.

My birthday’s closing in, again, & I just want to look again

like Harvey Keitel in 1973 & sing like Dolly Parton at age 71,

on the evening of Loretta Lynn’s stroke.

I’m wearing a white sleeveless t

& an unbuttoned Nudie Cohn suit top

& saddle shoes & no socks

& a broken nose & a tooth chipped

by an ex’s right jab. Dance with me.

There’s my curved spine, growing toward the screen,

the progenitor of whatever this is, the official sponsor

of weekday loneliness.

Voice-over explains the context that the image just can’t

carry & the director is too scared to cut. I don’t see it.

I want it to look again like it does in all of your first family

photographs, era announced by the home décor & haircuts.

I’m aging as I watch this. I’m closer to death than birth, even

if I accept Jesus Christ as my personal doula.

Instead, I flip through the box & await your birth. Give me something

in a 1977. Announce it with wood paneling & hair

so thoroughly brushed that it’ll need to be corrected

with a decade’s worth of perms. I’ll just sit down

on the tile floor & wait for the screaming.

The Answer

This child-sized raccoon just casually scaled that entire maple,

slow as a professional sunset.

Mallick light gets sleepy, gets sticky, & congeals.

Minnesota is not the answer. There’s no way lakes lie

like that lake lies nightly. Awake & alone,

I’m sitting here sleepy as a Kennedy on Nantucket,

waves groping at the nearest shore. 13,314 twilights

not the answer. That sound in the increasing darkness

over there is sleep spreading out & checking its net—

or a grazed deer limping—or a set piece falling.

Spotlights, oncoming headlights, not the answer.

This is a song called “Oncoming Headlights

Are Not the Answer.” This is the song I sing

until it’s over. Until it’s done. Until it’s sung. Until the crash.