Lines

Lines

are not as easy a geometry

as they seem:

           

            kids rubber toe their own

            in the day old dry dirt, they draw

            face to face if they’re playing

            or if they mean it shoulder 
            to shoulder and deep

            with their heel, and it’s

            a gully and on each side

            they groan and spit

            they are fist and bone

            until they settle it

            and later their deep line’s

            a stream to pee in and laugh

            as it all goes down hill

            into the green that later

            the neighbor’s loose dog

            sniffs and covers

            with his own hot self

Lines

as drawn with surveyor’s

tape, a stream and a tree:

            and the story of a kid

            climbing this willow and the boundary

            stake's gone nearly clean

            into the trunk or enough

            not to be seen so how the Jesus

            falling did that blade run clean

            through his jaw and not

            a yell or a cough but his mother

            drawn to the spot by a prick

            on her skin, on her esophagus

            caught…pulling him off

            was the easy part.  she never

            unsees his bloody teeth

            and the clean white stream

            of sun coming (once just once, brief

            so years later she’d

            imagined it completely

            because her recovered son

                        three kids of his own now

            said Ma it was raining that day

            you said go out to play

            and I said in the rain

            and you said just stay on this side

                        of the gate

            but she swears one shaft—

            you know, what Saul went blind with

            shot down on his skull

            while she lifted him

            like meat off a hook

            and felt those teeth in his skull—

Lines,

like those I’m thinking about,

road paint lines

white and yellow lines

chopped double or solid lines

depending on the bending spine

of the highway, yes, those

solid lines that click their tongues or guide

or tease or float or blur

or hide or fade

and knowing is only years

coming down the road and I’m telling you

right now I had it I had it

the left yellow the whole time

I had it and boy if it didn’t have me

I wiped my eyes

if I didn’t I tell you I had it

on my shoulder the whole time

I didn’t slip it was left of me

even while my face flew

into the windshield the line

the center line

the property line

the I dare you line
the line the line right up up into me

like vomit