Every time I go back to that town,

more trees are missing.

The swimming pool across the road

is now swamp, reeds growing

beneath the diving boards,

cracks spiderwebbing plaster.

The creek always flooded there,

gray-brown mire spilling

across the sandbox

and turning the pool to muck.

Now: no more jukebox glowing

in the snack stand. No more Dixie cups

littering the grass. One summer

I came home and the doors

were suddenly boarded up,

and sometimes it happens like that—

you think you’re paying enough attention

and then you look closer and see

that the whole stream has shifted,

silt covers the overgrown parking lot

where you once crushed ice in your snow boots

and the shack where you bought chicken

is now closed, the roof caving in,

moss growing over picnic tables.

If you’re lucky, you’ll develop a taste

for absence, find relief in the space

of what remains.

I used to want things so deeply it tasted like dirt.

And what could ever live up to that—

to holding the earth,

dark and rooted, in your mouth?

There was one year when the creek

didn’t flood, but a deer hopped the fence

and drowned in the pool,

and I watched from my bedroom

as the water turned the color of black tea.

I wonder what stain I’ll leave behind,

what shape my absence will take.

Will the creek keep flooding

or will it dry up? I like to think

that the room where I slept

will be forest someday,

the house bulldozed or left to collapse

next to where the deer dissolved

in the ditch it was dragged to.

Now—for absence, read

transfiguration.

A sapling growing from a seed

in the dead deer’s belly. Wildflowers

in the deep end.

Florescence.