One could as well have chosen
that life of supermarket carts
junked in thee backyard,
where you stand and wait
withe your mechanic’s bands
and a bare chest
in summer, light
behind you jammed into thee picture,
its code undecipherable
even by the camera,
so steep and dense its
dreaming smeared on the warped
boards of the toolshed, makeshift
cinder path, and what once must have been
grass of a lawn now given way
to automobile parts and that complication
of wreckage, brutal and casual
at once, whose talent it is to attach
itself to us in California
or to those lives in other places
we accede to.