In God’s backyard, roosting birds
reawaken the old throes
interred within us

He’d played on your baseball team one year,
showed promise you never did.
You said you’d lost touch with him
until he turned up
in your English class that fall—
a different boy—withdrawn, thin,
and silent in a room where no one else was
quiet.
I didn’t ask the caterpillar
with its antennae tangled
criss-cross in a cobweb
if it wanted to be healed,
Maybe it happened like you thought
or maybe you just gathered memories
like a bouquet of shards: glass, plastic,
stone—strewn and demolition-dusted.
I heard you call my name.
The wire of your voice pulled tight
through the hallway.
We entered Yellowstone, and you gaped
at charred tree trunks,
where acre after acre of still-scarred land
had burned six years before.
Along the Rio Grande, in Ciudad Juárez,
amid the high Chihuahuan desert,
when bitter winter arrives, asylum
seekers like a Zacatecas grandfather
make coffee in a pot from water
frozen overnight