Rangers

I can't kill any more fire ants without offering an explanation.

I can't explain chaos because that would make it something else.

Elsewhere my memories are only murmurs

but they get clearer when I think myself in the direction

of something more quenchable, a well or a garden hose.

As winter clings to the bottom

of spring's shoe, two siblings I mean

my sister and I shake insults

like salt over love like ice.

Don't tell us we've both been wrong

her that the dandelions are stars in the grass,

me that the grass is what we become.

To stand near like blades of the same jealous color,

wanting more than to grow up by the mailbox

with sprinklers crying all over us,

I'm glad our raincoats are matching.

Childhood is a lawn that yawns for yards and yards.

How many times I've laid spread out in it while the sun

began putting itself away inside the drawer

of night, the cooling grass growing green to forest green

against my arms. Let's show the moon

the man in our palms. Let's howl at each other.

If only to state our fondness for one another

as meanly as we can.

Kyle Constalie lives and works in Iowa City. His poems have appeared in Touchstone and been on exhibit in collaboration with visual artwork at the Pump House Regional Arts Center. He writes about literature and other art at tell-me-again.blogspot.com, and is a contributor to Marc and Bobby’s Dissent, a political blog, at marcandbobby.blogspot.com.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/constaliek_poems.php

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