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 Blossom has surrounded you with flowers overnight While your life, you realized, there was peace, all the vines intertwined in a canopy Closed and tight around you While your legs and arms and chest Deep and crowned in the downward, where your resurrected self Will grow from the ground, and be flowered where you slept Every petal will stand all the promises Elster stares alone at the screen