Thinking of your father, you stop at the casino in Lame Deer

with the intention to play Blackjack.

 

From the parking lot, you watch a tall woman in cut-off

denim shorts carry a toddler and a liter bottle of water

 

as she walks the side of the highway.

The road is hot and straight but the casino

 

wears a rounded roof and shelters swallows in its eaves,

little mud nests plastered into edges, holding on

 

with dry grasses curved like fingers. At the D and D Trading Post

next door, you could buy peanuts and moldy oranges

 

if you wanted to, but you don’t. Instead, you buy

Gatorade and a pack of gum. Whisky bottles

 

and beer cans pile like empty memories beside the door.

A flyer announces movie night at Chief Dull Knife College.

 

Motorcycles pass semi’s on low hills despite the solid

yellow line, throw the love of Jesus at minivans and sedans.

 

Heat rises from the asphalt in blue waves. You are

a lone Black-eyed Susan, haunting the casino parking lot.

 

You don’t go in.

 

You listen to the passing cars, the sound

of other lives hurtling through – a whoosh, a wheeze.

 

Rosebud Creek dries like a cough caught

in the high-up lungs of the river it tries to feed.

 

You snap a photo of clouds with your cell phone,

the pale blue sky between them blank in the frame.

 

What you remember when you kneel behind the casino and pour

your father’s ashes among the sagebrush and prairie grass is

 

the circling swallows, churring a dry-throated screech,

and the sky, desperately unfolding itself

 

into schisms of beauty

raw and wild.