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.