CASEY THAYER

Elegy with Crows and Canebrake


Months before the moths outline mangled angels
           the window screen. Months before 

he loses his temper, puts her bitch down
           for biting. Baloney, she says, hooks her thumbs

in his belt as if sex will help. Out back
           the rapids of the arroyo a jagged smile

they lost a kid to one night, hiccupping
           whiskey. Poor soul, the he he was

gone into the blue too soon. Before the doc
            calls it ruthless, her man’s chest hollow

as a guitarra, neck a braided collar in a Kahlo
           print. Before he paints his self portrait

with canebrake & demons disguised as crows,
           she ropes him. Held belt, pins his back

to barbwire, & like every tooth
           he’ll wiggle loose, she stores reminders.

Saves the harness of every dead horse
           he loved because she knows she’ll forget

him otherwise. Months before foxes gown
           the hillside in the grey dawn, she studies  

his empty leather belt, the buckle
           a battered set of horns, fake gold plating

she can peel off with her nail. Before the doc
           calls it too far gone. Before the doc keeps calling.

How for weeks they found signs
           of the drowned boy, a fifth half-filled

with sand, the ghost’s clothes: a boot all-buried
           but the toe in the wash-out, his white boxers

hung like a bandana over the arm
           of a saguaro. But never the boy himself.

How she lays against her man nights
           & hears nothing in his chest like she sleeps

on the glass-thin ice over a draining lake.
           A land haunted by the leaving, by what’s left.


  
148 The Paris-American

Casey Thayer holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Devil's Lake, North American Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. This fall, he will begin a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

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  Next week's poet:

 Cate MarvinCCCACc