Driving Through Kansas, Listening to the Radio

with lines from Octavio Paz’s A Draft of Shadows

I have only ever seen the shadow
of clouds on the ocean and on the plains.
As in your body / spilled on my body /
seen / dissolved / makes the watching real. A choir
on The River sings an arrangement of
“Amazing Grace,” poultry like fall leaves sleep
outside the dim light of the auction’s door,
and just like that – it’s gone: another town
whose name I’ll never try to remember.
I think before you came into my mouth
you were a fever made of my watching –
a cloud-shape I could know but could not name,
like those walls printed with ash and honey –
a pattern I could track but could not touch.