Keep the Receipt

We have seen only what we've been allowed
and it's been too much

but the receipt for each allowance
is kept someplace—

a dumpster behind Sylvan Lanes
that only I may access.

The dark grainy
air
can look like rain—

pulsing static
and
streaking
in eye-tricking diagonals.

The wind in the uncut
fat grass
can give color:

to the white then silver
blades

to the lilac's bounce.

The lilac breath has taken on
a violence

a roughness thrown around
recklessly by a hushed motor
like
the seizures of dads
burning knees
on the rough TV room carpet
and
the biting of tongues.

The crabapple tree is full of bees
and full of blossoms:

all of them—
the bees and the blossoms—
hovering in its total churning
when night is falling and
the world will not settle.

Then
the infants have black eyes
full of tornados
and all of that blackness
there before birth
and there to be had
after death.

Meanwhile
the world starts to milk its way in
with slow whiteness waking
so that the blackness
fuzzes to blue—

the grass takes on so much color.

We went for a late walk
after a full day
and stuck our faces into all of the blossoms
and peered into the rosy makeup
of the night girls'
cheeks:

everything we sniffed
left us caked in pollen and
powder.