I Pull Away from Screens like a Junkie, Reluctantly—

to wash the dog in October

tied to the sunny porch, drying out

barking as I go about filling buckets

to haul ten gallons of water

to five bickering chickens where I see

Brownie’s plucked feathers grew back

to yank blossom-end-rot tomatoes

off dwindling patio plants

before the others go bad too

to notice rusty hummers have moved on

and my troubled neighbor

must be drinking again by the sound of it

and my ear is still an echo chamber

hissing like a seashell I carry everywhere

an improvement over the usual sound

of distant heavy machinery in my head

as if men were shifting gears in me, moving dirt,

tearing up trees, pouring a concrete path through a forest

abandoning failed broken slabs

and bottles of yellow piss

on the shoulder of my wilderness

—the most anti-consumerist, purposeless

I’ve been in months, sitting here, scribbling this

watching the dog grow glossy