I relapse
in that draft where the door
was once. A machine

removed most of the street
then filled it in again.
We say it’s the same

but it’s not at all. Now the walls
vibrate. The farmer
barely sleeps,

my pictures hesitate, the latches
want unhooking. Next door
someone’s irate brothers slash

someone’s boyfriend’s tires.
The farmer says he won’t
be back again

and won’t bring beets
when he doesn’t come. Fine,
I know, there’re other ways to be

bloody-handed and
in the margins where rodents
are dead, a muskrat,

an ordinary rat. What
I’m humming is this: bad
judgment, hunger, sadness?

Merely clumsy, me,
I hit the brakes, I save
a skunk. Later at my stoop

the machine is folded-up
and huger than a hundred of us
in a crowd, put together.