Battered
Those boys must have learned
to bear the Wyoming wind
from snow fences bent along
the highway,
from fields
flat as their eyes
no asylum,
from tides of antelope
skirring through frozen needle-and-thread,
followed by the scud of grifters,
hypothermic vultures.
Beating
him to death,
they were like children
who had learned
first the burn of wind,
then to turn a cold cheek,
hands cupping ears
blocking the sound
of a wind with no beginning, no end.
They kept at it
how many times
they can’t remember
only that he had always been with them,
part of that wind,
the one intimate sibling.
