A fist full of angry thistle that you’ve pulled
by a ditch along blacktop

                   cutting and carving through cornfields in the
dumb, dark name of progress near
                                      Elkhart, Indiana. Whose name itself is elegy
for some four-legged beast, or maybe a day long

                  gone when beauty once grew from blood to
hang like a yoke so heavy round the neck of an

                   Indiana boy. His head now inked and
jarred by the size of this elk’s junked heart. And who
                                     knows what killed that elk, if it wondered
lost and lame, limping through

                    miles of meadow until it could walk
no more. Finally nuzzling the shade

                  of an old-growth oak or elm to be
pecked and pulled by buzzards so this boy would no longer
                                      question the girth of an elk’s stilled heart. Its quick
rhythm finished, as he reached to touch

                   some seed with roots through squalid rooms
that no longer walled racket and clatter. For today, they’d

                   up-sprung flowers. The umber of muscle and
vibrant white petals which shone in the vast
                                     wide light of a sun winding round in a sky. Its
axis always steady—and shining, perhaps, in excess—as that boy ran

                  yelling of yarrow, how it grew so wild from a heart. Or to gather a
zinnia for seed that he might zip it tight in that thick rich soil.