Theory When a Western Light Goes Out
       

Tonight, the wind plucks leaves from their branches.
A coroner, it drops

the near-dead
in front of my door. I rise to the porch, gather the halfway

bodies. Pressed between dictionary pages, their veins
leave brown stains,

like blood.
Little souls stamped between faucet and fog, dead and dreaming,

Alive and alone. I hang their imprints on the wall.
As a girl, I played

a silver harmonica
that I swore would sound without a mouth to it,

a wind made by those mouths locked in meadows,
their teeth gone.

Once, I saw a stag
set to be buried in a coffin, satin-lined. His antlers sleeked,

his muscles glistened slick with embalming fluid.
Even then I thought,

how strong—
the animal poised to leap in a different life.

In a different life, the invisible would not just be visible,
but more beautiful.

Every past
wrong, undone: the stag not dead, but awake

in a green meadow; a hole in the ceiling not for a leak
but for rain,

warm rain,
to clean the interior; my father, not buried,

but sleeping
the peaceful sleep of a body in love with the earth.

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Copyright © 2022 L. A. Johnson All rights reserved
from The Greensboro Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission