HOUR OF SECRET AGENTS

The code word, he whispered, just before
letting go, was code word. Asshole,
I thought, watching his head
get smaller and smaller until it ended
in a puff of dust. Where it began,
I thought again, and spun around.
The landfill stretched on for miles.
I heard the voices of lost products beneath me.
My wheelbarrow was missing a wheel. A red bird
flew by, as if on a mission to flee this landscape
as soon as possible. The charred body of an infant
crawled out from a plastic bag. I stepped back,
covering my mouth. It crawled
a little further, then collapsed.
A pre-recorded voice announced it was feeding time.
I masticated my last handful of brazil nuts
but it took forever; by the time I finished
I’d forgotten what I was doing and swallowed.
Nobody wanted you anyway, I shouted,
when it began to cry. My wheelbarrow
was missing a wheel. I’ll never get out of here.
It was just a barrow. I flipped it over
on top of the infant. “Ancient graves,”
I wrote in my notebook, “are where the living
feel most alive.” A bulldozer
started up, two mounds over. Seagulls
swarmed its yellow bucket raising
piles of blue surgical gowns
to the sun. The skin on my face tightened.
The bird with the red breast flew by again
precisely in the same direction, which confused me.
The rubber soles of my shoes were burning.
Coils of smoke rose between fissures.
From the tip of a far-off mound
a CD repositioned the sun
straight into my eyes, although it could have been
a signal, the permission I was waiting for,
the sign I was clear to return, was once again
unknown, or no longer known, a night sky,
the honesty of stars, a bowl of glass oranges
centered on a table, centered in a room,
a room that had never been opened
or if it had, by a trembling, white glove.
The infant was still crying in its makeshift grave.
The red bird flew by again, this time in my mind.

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