We lived in Carbon Canyon then, before the fire,
unpack that given irony—were there no
carbon copies, we so unique and blessed?

There was a time when I walked 
with my three-year-old daughter
(I think three…).
Anyway, I know we were walking the deep decline
of Carbon Canyon
on one of those short, mommyless jaunts…
And we came upon
the recently car-crushed carcass
of a gray field mouse, part three-dimensional
as in life,
part flattened as in a drawing,
the weight of the car 
having made its lower half unreal, a cartoon.
The driver long gone, 
unaware of their handiwork, guiltless.

A tiny trickle of blood from its slightly opened 
mouth, a last profound unheard utterance,
so perfectly dramatic and telling
as if to seem placed by a movie crew
hiding in the bushes perhaps.

And my daughter (two, three, four?)
about to spy it on the ground, and I, a daddy,
with knowledge spilling out of my pockets,
life lessons, sense a teaching moment for the disquisition 
on mortality that every parent believes
every three-year-old needs—
(see, it all ends, best laid plans and all that,
life’s unfair; carpe diem, little one;
Latin for… heaven; there but for the grace of god—)
in these moments, I realize I am nothing but a recording
of my parents’ voices—their greatest hits,
my soul their phonograph…

Fade in: a father slows his daughter, allowing
the chance to happen upon a dead mouse,
it/death knowledge. Consequence. Mortality.
But it is only now, as we kneel, 
that I notice the vibrant cha-cha line of ants
dancing in and out of the ruined creature
in all their anarchic discipline,
carrying to and fro unseeable bits of meat
and nutrient mouse ooze.

And my breath catches 
because suddenly this lesson is for Daddy,
and it is Daddy who cannot face too much death,
the death after death, my death
in this mouse’s mouth, my daughter’s death.
I’ve not quite stomach enough
to face the pieces of us all carried off into oblivion,
eaten till we are unrecognizable, digested,
shit. Roadkill.

Dizzying, I say, “Oh, let’s go, sweetheart…”

But it’s too late—my daughter,
two or three or four, has seen,
leans down farther, her blue eyes
an inch or two from the ground, and says,
“Daddy, look, the ants, there’s so many of them.”
“Yes, I see. Maybe we should let the mouse sleep, let her 
sleep.”

I take her hand to lead her, though I don’t know where.
I know I am blind and unprepared,
a child leading a child,
and the little one stops and smiles,
and points back to the carnage—

“No, the ants, Daddy, the ants—look how much they love her.”

The old demons these days,
not what they used to be, call me
by pet names, their fondness
barely hidden beneath perfunctory hostility.
I know for a fact a certain childhood Terror
that literally yearns to make me dinner.
But like cartoon nemeses, they are fixed;
Coyote must chase Roadrunner;
it’s in his nature and in the script.

These days I see Coyote at the bar, slapping
that annoying fucking bird on the tail like a teammate,
buying drinks all around, toothless, the Acme handbook,
unattended in his back pocket, laughing at all the old
indignities, cataloging the injuries, the falls,
the explosions in his face as if
they are tattoos, not scars, 
art, not violence.
But in his eyes, only a fool would deny
a shimmer of the old chaos, so

I sometimes commit the sin of forgetting
the possibility that dreams, daydreams, stray thoughts,
still have gain of function, can still
open up doors to old worlds, introduce the old gods
into the vacuum.

Drunk, at two a.m., and rabid, Coyote 
manages a first howl in years and wonders:

Where the fuck have I been?

A bloody feather
floats to earth
like my complacent heart.

What I want to know is
what idiot
gave that fucking blind kid
a bow and arrow?

Here there is always someone else.
Something else. Somewhere else.
There is always another answer,
and like dated milk, good for only so long,
a season or two. Maybe.

Your container will be filled yearly, monthly,
daily, and you’ll rise in the morning
as empty as a slice of blue sky in the uncanny valley.
You will cry, sure, you want to be tucked into
consciousness like a prefab piece, and it’s true,
everything you see whispers of satisfaction—

Cars seem to wanna fuck you.

Clothes seem to wanna fuck you.

Music seems to wanna make you as young
as when you first heard it, and then fuck you.

So you forget your way back—
leaving all this on a beat that says:
There is no leaving this.