Postscripts      
by José Luis Gutiérrez

Every love story is a ghost story.

                                                                -David Foster Wallace

i

Somewhere in the heartland, along the side of the road,

you’re taking pictures of a twilit field populous with crows.

I sit in the car, commiserating with the dog.

You focus on a red barn soon to turn black.

Your aqua skirt flows in the current of whispering grass.

A blue bandanna lends you the grace and grit

of Georgia O’Keefe scouring the landscape for a subject.

I’ll never forget your look that evening

as you’d settled back behind the wheel.

For a moment, as the power lines east and west merged

with the coming night, your face glowed with its own

light: first among the earthbound stars.

ii

What unnameable acts have brought us to this place?

Blindfolded and dumb in the aftermath.

You, me and the dog:

in a derelict space before the world.

A silo stands vigil on the mothering ground

and is granary to a thousand heavens.  

This town ghosted to mimeograph the event:

shop windows boarded,

vacant lots of antediluvian dust swirling into deserts, into lunar expanse.

You, me and the dog:

a frieze effaced by the wind.

You, me and the dog:

this moment,

drawing an even breath among the sky-colored contingencies.

iii

You awake in the vitreous night.

The sound of a river roaring through your life.

In the distance a muezzin gives longing a voice.

You sense the rise of hills and the smell of oranges.

The hissing of a wheat field extends into immeasurable space.

Your lover has left you the gift of her absence and the moonlight.

There is the weight of stones bearing down the length of your arms.

Your fisted hand opens and yields a white moth in the cold white moonlight.