¥ the circus is in town just fifty yards away all the women have beards there are stalls and stalls of tambourines and shakers Rome you’re the only one for me put your hands on my pasture push pins in my cork board tap lightly at the plate glass of my window ¥ today is a crowd of pigeons the streets are all trimmed in white children run furiously through blue-tiled fountains eight bulls’ horns hang from a chapel spire in Arkansas many small matadors let moist black dirt fall collectively through their fingers I hold three bulls’ ears in my teeth ¥ I’ve lost my taste for magic I can see myself running naked down the dried bed of the Clinton river where it bends around the thicket where I found the dead doe with its eyes plucked out where I waded with my jeans rolled up bare unsteady feet on the wet stones to a pyre of bottle rockets and beer ¥ in the middle of these suburban woods the Clinton river bends around me I am an oil lantern the brown crumpled leaves gather in close at my feet I can see past the beaver dam past the pile of sticks I made into a fort past the dead doe frozen in place I can reach out and touch every part of Michigan