Small Nation

The first time my brother and I played chicken
on the railroad tracks, we leapt from the bridge

before the train was anywhere near us.
We splashed down at the same moment,

then treaded water while listening to the train
drowning out the sounds of the cicadas.

Afterwards, we lay on our backs in the current
and watched the eye of the moon rolling back

into the skull of the clouds, and we listened
to the breezes sifting through the dreadlocks

of the willows. And that winter there was often
a live wire of blue light at dusk in the field

behind our father’s barn, and we studied how it lived
inside itself, how it seemed older than the moon,

its own small nation. And once we carried saucers
onto the garage roof and sledded off the edge into open

air, down into a snowdrift, and that was the same winter
my brother broke his collarbone twice, and we stole

a hunting knife and a hatchet from the unlocked shed
of a neighbor. Later, when my brother went to prison,

I would tell myself that something was already
forming on those days and nights of our childhood,

was already formed, even though we leapt
with equal abandon toward the river.