Elster Stares the Desert Down

You were staring from the kitchen at the yard after work

Through the window where the owners pulled the tree from the earth and dirt

Stands piled where the earth was disturbed

You can move it toward the fence to fill the garden bed built last spring

Where you never planted anything yet?

Dying flowers in the face on the sill

Still tryna find a pattern in the scatter of leaves

Though you were never really one to have your fortune or a prophecy read

And Elster stares the desert down

Thirty miles from the center of town

And around in the night falling in like a crown

Do any missing people ever get found?

Do they ever get found?

In the back of the shed

And the things that they left, with the tools on the shelf

There's a box full of gloves, and some seeds and a kit

So you took it all out, and you brought us to the yard

And you dig

Little holes in all the rows that you made

And the dirt with the spade maybe two inches wide

And you kneel on your knees, go to lay them inside

But you lay down instead, and you slept as if dead for a week

And Elster starts addressing the crowd

In a bunker thirty feet underground

And the sound in the room is like a voice in a tomb

Echoes banging in his memory now

Now will they ever get out?

If there is a last thing I will see before I go, let that thing be

A better me

And to climb down the pile in the yard and the tree

To see how far into our future I could see

And Elster stares at night at the phone

Catatonic, alone but for the hum of the dial tone

Glowing like a ghost in the screen

When I go and I leave here, will the missing people ever find peace?

If there is a last thing I will see before I wake up, let it be

You in the bed there, fast asleep

Softly dreaming of our garden

Dreaming roses, growing older

Getting harder for our knees to bring us down to pull the weeds

The seeds start sprouting outward