Hour Poem by Christian Hawkey

I was lying on my side, in a ditch,
soaking my flanks in bog water
with my head propped up, on an elbow,
highway a few inches from my nose.
Semis thundered past. The grass
flattened its ears. My body shook.
I was humming a song. This was my spot.
Tadpoles are a form of punctuation.
Frogs hide inside commas. A whooping crane
landed & began showing off its legs.
Birds go for the eyes, I thought,
so I looked away, humming a song
about looking away, about looking back,
about fingers wrapped around the flesh
that holds the ribs down to the hips
& hot mangoes rotting, the ground littered
with yellow suns, drainpipe
where the field ends, its dark ooze
the greenest earth. A man walks by
with a giant crucifix on his back
—ALASKA BY SPRING!—cars
speed up to pass him, which makes sense,
even the whooping crane leaves without a sound.
My jaw is wired shut. I'm humming a song
about cleaving, the body drifting apart & what
keeps us from dissolving at the first
drop of rain, my left flank almost
marinated, a sprig of rosemary between my lips,
robots have been dispatched to remove me,
all fruit mirrors the sun, a black seed
against my heart, a black car
driving past, buffeting my chest
& a cell phone lands, right in front of my face:
"It's alright," I whisper into it, "a French donkey,
called a Poitou, whose long ropes of fur
drag along the ground,
was also used, in the mid-to-late 18th century, to polish floors."