Take if you will this improbable boy,
skin like August arcing toward its apex,
heat sheen across the highway, hazy
gloss on the way things seem, in transit
from one state to another. Raised by the same god
of vacant Sunday parking lots
and imported palm trees, natives of nothing
near home, he comes from the high sound
of his own voice, his skin sings something
he can’t recall, a sudden wind through yellow-
brown palm fronds, rising and as quickly gone,
rising and subsiding all at once, at one
with nothing held in place.

Take if you will this boy made out
of wish and will-not-ever-be, made out
to be something he’s not, breeze
through the trees. Puzzle his riddling
skin, his irrigated desert
body couched in eroding
mountains. Ride out the rustling sibilants
and make a man into an effigy:
of summer skin, the last exemplar.