The horse’s yellow skull soaks in the bucket.
I scrub with the nailbrush, slowly, and brace with my thumb

each loosening, thumb-sized, long-grooved tooth. Do names
matter? Even towns dissolve.

The wind can fling a horse twenty feet in a tree.
Body bones scatter in weeds. Flesh, hide,

all goes. Briars creep to the dirt road’s edge
and are crushed by tires, serrated purple leaves

and thorns no good for anything.

*

People called them Roanoke dolls, indestructible.

Except my grandma’s, which burned to pulp
in their fourth house, which burned to blackened joists,

windows exploding like new suns in November.

*

Downhill, against the horizon of starred windshield,

a neon Christ clicks on its string from the mirror.
Tick, it’s like somebody’s heart.

Against the blue balloon of sky, a steeple
pricks a hole. Not in my real heart, but the one

that holds each gasp of breath too long on Sunday
afternoons when someone might come back,

pull up in his dad’s blue Chevelle. He might,
I might, think of something to say. No one comes back.

*

Reflected in my windshield, nothing. My face.

My father is dead. My father is, ten minutes later,
still dead. Leaves scrape past. My small daughter

in the backseat says, “There’s ghosts. Can we go home?”