Love is in the air

I walk point on the line, with Joe
fifty feet behind to double check I don’t miss
the hiss or the fumes. Step and stop.
Step and stop. There’s a crack somewhere
in the two miles of two-inch running
from the ridge to the streambed meter
where the pressure reads ten instead of twenty.

It’s too cold to yank half-buried tubing;
it could snap and arc a hydrocarbon rainbow. But holes
can hide under a year’s dirt, muffled, and you hope
that the line’s curl lifts it up like a rollercoaster,
or that salt will leak and melt the top-lying snow.

If hunters knew how brine pools
in the line when it follows the ground’s curve,
they’d all be out with hacksaws, making
saltlicks in the tree cover. There are flickers
of camo through the grey web of branches;
and shots, but they’re maybe a half mile off
and my head’s an orange.

There is some squeak at my feet, enough
that I stop and hold my breath in time
for a grouse to burst with a delirious chuckle
of wings. Two miles, and the light is purpling–
no time to hunker by a tree trunk
until my knees steady.

And it’s too cold to breathe through my mouth
but my nose wants to whistle like methane
through a cracked pipe. Step and stop
like a bridesmaid. I can’t hear
hissing if my feet crunch in snow, or if I sing
at the top of my lungs to alert man and deer
that I have only teflon tape, a coupling, some clamps.

Different recording software and microphone.