Untitled ("I know I am talking to easy")

A canyon poem of cultural roughness and emotional fragmentation, mixing Elvis, crows, and bodily gesture into one unstable scene.

A loose, associative monologue that admits at the outset 'I know I am talking to easy,' then strings together an upturned car roof 'filled with crows,' the difficulty of 'building football fields / in our canyons,' Elvis songs audible 'for a hindred miles,' and a frank, intermittent eroticism - 'I drop my bottoms / to the floor / Not always / Sometimes' - ending on 'I take the pieces / apart twice.'

The opening self-awareness ('talking to easy') licenses the poem's free drift while flagging that the ease is a bit of a confession. The crow-filled upside-down car roof is a striking image of wreckage repurposed as a roost, decay turned habitat. 'Building football fields / in our canyons' is wry geography - the impossibility of flat American leisure in vertical Appalachian terrain, the canyon refusing the country's standard amusements. Elvis carries 'for a hindred miles' (note the 'hindred' for hundred), the King's voice filling the holler the way the crows fill the car. The erotic turn is striking for its candor and its hedging: 'I drop my bottoms / to the floor,' immediately qualified 'Not always / Sometimes,' a sexuality offered and then rationed. The final 'I take the pieces / apart twice' is ambiguous - dismantling something, or herself, more than once - and the doubling ('twice') suggests a habit of taking things, or intimacy, fully apart. The casual surface and the unsettling images sit in deliberate tension, exactly the gap the first line names. The spelling 'hindred' is the source's and I have kept it; the poem's connective logic is associative rather than narrative, so it resists a single literal through-line.