'Nothing is hiding behind this picket fence ...'
Eels, 'Susan's House'

The Mustang is idle,
out to grass at the side of the road,
absorbing the heat into its mock leather seats.

I sit at the wheel while the photographer sleeps,
reading Lowell on marriage,
'the monotonous meanness of his lust'

in a suburb-still street in Sun City West
where only the old are allowed to live
and the neighbours keep check on each others' houses.

A man in a track-suit
takes his oxygen tanks for a walk
and a single bird hits a piano wire mid flight,

its note settling without telling
what kind of bird it is,
leaving another space between sense and knowing.

The photographer in the passenger seat
doesn't move, sedated by the heat,
his lower lip dropped
and his finger on the trigger
of the shutter, as if he'd died
and finally shot the perfect still.

Only his breath, deep and dry,
tells me this isn't so, as above us
the Superstition mountains tear an edge off the sky

and somewhere off camera
a rattlesnake uncoils from Winter ---
shakes itself alive, without knowing why.