Flecks of white dots, hatched from orange dots,
shiver on withered vines,
swarm upward when bumped.
 
Above the concrete part of the yard,
the security light remains dark,
undetecting motions
from varmints and waving branches,
the project of its fixing still undone.

Patches, whitish as plaque, peek through
peeled parts of the bleached deck floorboards.

As bones akimbo, bones alone
picked clean, strewn on a desert, weathered,
pure white.

Here, the dark floor: night, no light.
A faint greenish cast, like a film of gas,
something slightly greasy: luminescent plastic,
in the daytime, preparing to glow:
fake teeth, little gods, naked pink babies,
size of a knuckle, baked salmon color, phony flesh.

Something bright, irregular, glimpsed in the predawn:
how the mind struggles to transcribe:
a twisted sheet—but she never uses white ones there,
on his couch bed by the living room door.
White Bones, White body.
He had stripped off his wet duds.
Stark: naked, but not pink.

It takes a while for the reasons to dawn. 
In Nova Scotia, June, in the woods: white splotch
beneath a far fur tree.
For shame, an ugly bag of trash left behind.
Scraped white wart root under the covering blister.
Flat, ribbed segment of tapeworm appears in the scope,
sick white against the dark interior colon tunnel,
puzzling symptoms explained by a seeing probe.
But—surprise—an optical trick, a flick of perception:
the bag became a dense pile of slow melting snow,
like the old sketch of beauty and the hag.

Or: middle of the night, a thud, a cry.
Long white bones, scattered pickup sticks
fill the narrow hall against the gleam of dark wood.

Out on a schoolyard stood The White Tree,
now a cut stump.
Photos of nooses, fights, arrests, and protests.
Chop the tree down to disguise the problem.
Maggots cluster, icebergs melt in global heat,
hail balls beat records in their summer assaults,
sudden, sleep-disturbing moon stuns
through the blind's slats, middle of the night.