I traded the tarot deck in for a wishing machine.

This part of land, acre along bay, makes

for a good start. If the corn grows tall

by July, the stronger the gears. There’s a true

science to this, there are atoms involved.

The humming cold, salted dirt. Upturned

to sky, the prophesized fires return—

an audience of rays, sunlike tendrils—winter’s

edge. Behind the marsh’s edge, sky fallows

fields. Beyond body: a jar filled with stripped bones

steeped in formalin, true fish skeleton

of study, what swam before me was grieving

and had been a long time. I find the church bare,

I find an echo, a gilded tear—the empty fossil

of smoke. The reverb within stone shaped by a knowing

hand and the arch sketched for the collapse

of voices. Before form, my body lived through

an architect’s music: all the hemorrhaging

of disaster’s blueprint. The hormonal defects, flesh

that grows wrong along the organ, the bewildering

silvers. I give my brain over to the wish

machine, I crank the handle, a windmill

shape projecting onto grass warring men, charred

fields, screens of clouds too thick

for the lungs. On the shore, it bleeds sandy

hilts, bullets and buttons, a child’s thimble—the skyline

releases ice. The path ends, I mean, the grass grows wild

here. What comes, stretches

the windows into stairs. Standing

at the icy palm of thawing creeks, I give

   into living as a form of trust.