Prowler by Heartland

POETRY

by Eric Roy

Each morning, coffee on the back porch first
means undoing (in order): chain lock, dead bolt,
door jammer, kickdown stopper at your feet.
A red cardinal sings lookie lookie lookie here!
Everything’s a menace to the brown cardinal
tending nest in a dusty chandelier hanging inside
the converted pumphouse, amber leaded windows
broken but somehow still sticking it out together.
The Dixie RV Park sign now reads RV Park Lane.
You walk the noisy caliche road to an oval lake
surrounded by a concrete drive. Invisible people
inside uncommitted homes with peculiar names:
Work & Play by Forest River; Imagine by JayCo;
Prowler by Heartland. On your way back home,
a red-eared slider in the farm-to-market road
pulls his head and legs in as a white Ford dually
pulls a caged trailer full of bored goats over him.
Once his head pokes out, you both continue on.
Later, when mom goes to her weekly meeting,
you fire up the ’57 GMC Stepside and slowride  
until night sinks itself into an unfathomable sea.
The house with every light on, its halo attracting
schools of listless insects, appears suspended,
a deep-submergence vehicle (DSV) navigating
an abyssal plain. One by one you kill the lights
to better see the stars. But a half-moon’s broken
mirror is still too bright to make out what Virgo
holds in her outstretched hand. A rusted groan,
miserable windmill, creaks and conjures ghosts
who harmonize from the trees with the tinnitus
in your head; it ends the same: chain lock, dead
bolt, door jammer, kickdown. Beside the jamb,
a childhood .410. Outside, a light will remain on,
on all the empty chairs worn from use by people
as a lone, dark something flies into a screen-door,
tap tap tap, trying to get in.