Under stars, listening to a coloratura soprano,
he looks at glimmering lights on a mesa
where suited technicians use gloved hands
inside sealed boxes to assemble pits
for W88 warheads. As he watches,
twenty-one miles to the north, three men
smoke crack, abduct a woman, inject
her with heroin, push her over a bridge
into the Rio Grande. And as she floats
to shore, he floats to shore, rises out
of the muck, in drenched jeans and T-shirt,
mouth bloodied, staggers, shivering,
to a lit house and finds no one’s unscathed.
Sparkling Ahs and Hell’s vengeance
erupt in starbursts under an August sky;
though people shout, in silence
he stands at a construction site, where
he lasts only a morning, as a foreman
hands him a sledgehammer and, leaning
on a block wall, says, Start swinging, start here.