Accountability

Cold nights outside the taverns in Wyoming

pickups and big semis lounge idling, letting their

haunches twitch now and then in gusts of powder snow,

their owners inside for hours, forgetting as well

as they can the miles, the circling plains, the still town

that connects to nothing but cold and space and a few

stray ribbons of pavement, icy guides to nothing

but bigger towns and other taverns that glitter and wait:

Denver, Cheyenne.

Hibernating in the library of the school on the hill

a few pieces by Thomas Aquinas or Saint Teresa

and the fragmentary explorations of people like Alfred

North Whitehead crouch and wait amid research folders

on energy and military recruitment posters glimpsed

by the hard stars. The school bus by the door, a yellow

mound, clangs open and shut as the wind finds a loose

door and worries it all night, letting the hollow

students count off and break up and blow away

over the frozen ground.