Wildcatting

​The redhead is a fool for love.
This September it's a driller from Houston.
She trails him east across a landscape
etched with dickey birds. Their metal beaks

reach down, bounce back like the glass canary
she set rocking in her grade school kitchen.
The bird illustrated perpetual motion, moved
by evaporation its head feather drifting idly.

the redhead stares from the pickup's cab,
while the steel birds pulse over the wells.​She rolls 
in from Texas in a reverie of lust, spinning
to the Gulf--Beaumont, Baton Rouge, Biloxi.

​Ahead of her over the hood, a crimson feather
pulls, dips, almost touched the water.