Ginger Learning How to Ride Watching

Cross-seeded patina sensory echo ghosts
nudge their way into the shoulder-lines
too stilled to be vacant like the remorse
of sister’s lost journals. Too weak for oil paints,
love in the forest of stressed leather patients,
ignoring Halloween in the corner of the day.
Learning how to ride watching soldiers at cookouts,
counting stocks and delaying their reprisal. The gloss
of their appearance leaves cooking oil on saints
and reserved forest weather on stall-crooked
countrymen. But she will learn to ride, watching,
distressed over the bare minimum
and at rest with the tools of atraumatic distantiation,
like a flock of feather phones in the August wind
or the pecking of September among the harlotry
of a baby’s nest inside the weighted vacuum
of sordid and calm desolation of grains of Paradise.