RETURN OF THE JEDI

Bird-shaped holes in the factory, but no birds. The jogger,
his legs unraveling into cobwebs, enters. I put a key
into the air, turn it – a golden retriever greets

the grandparents, all of them amazed to recognized
& still alive. My hands ring to be shook, foiled with
mediums, confused all over, but there are no wraiths

in this playground today. The resort town is gone, still
the ghost & his child stay, who coaxed me to take in
my second air & live again. Out of the sand, their hands

of help still waver. How they projected me, a green building,
raked together out of ideas, forward – the stranger at the brink
of a boat, holding the rope, turning back

out of habit. When I throw the pear-rind, ghost,
your boy catches it – over & over he catches.
The masks move through the pines, floating beside

all the bodies we’ve met & recognized, moving us
like arrows made of enough atoms to look human.
Arrows hugging arrows in the satchel

of genetics, where the retriever, his back hair twitching
to be remembered, will not die. Already we are
filling in the bird-shaped place with a basket

of electrons we call barn-swallow. Black-winged, badged
with burnt-orange & golden, the jogger
steps eagerly into his next first breath. Come now, cool fount:

we will never die. We instead will fall from that slide,
where the sand brings a specter & his boy to coax us
in, with the snaps of their coattails, again.

Wolftown VA