ravine
in a room with too many doors and
some of them open and
some of them closed and always
the fingers of ghosts down your spinealways the bones of aztecs dragged
into the 21st century as a
silent reminderthe bodies of nuns found raped
and slaughtered in roadside ditchesand your hands nervous at the
edges of the page and
your wife seven months pregnant and
the way she cries when the phone ringsthe way she apologizes for
all of the times she's ever told you
she hated you
and what holds you together is fear
and what you have in common
is the weight of desperationa postcard from the hill of fifteen crosses
with a message on the back
that reads i miss youand when she asks
if you love your father
you tell her that he's dead
and if she says that's not an answer
you just smileyou tell her about
the sand creek massacrethe women and children butchered
by drunken soldiers
while they lay sleeping
and then you tell her about
this kid you knew in high school
