First, circle your palms
around a dogwood tree.
Now squeeze. Strangle
loose every scaly leaf
until the moths that are
its petals unshutter their wings
and leave. If they should swirl
about you like a thousand
shrouds, die. If they do not,
then follow. Bring a net.
If a net is unavailable,
circle your palms around
a drop of the dizzied wind.
Take that moth upon your
tongue & grin. Should it thrash
itself against your teeth,
you are neither the sun
nor moon it navigates by,
keeping its body constantly
angled relative to their light.

Along I-25, Heading for Santa Fe

What the mountains
offer

where there’s nothing
you want?

In this faltering light,
the light.

—lines found in habry, Helen Degen Cohen

In the middle of the universe
 in its silent eye
 like a black pearl,
take a deep breath with me, and rest

in the deep forests of the earth
 wildflowers
silken blue, among orange poppies
 deep, deep in
and the silence blows.

Now her high time is over.
  Let her lines speak—

it was, really
 all the little days
 the things she saved alive
with such wildness
 a rose in her hand
 weightless and smiling

 humming & humming

Oh Lord, there is
 her poetry to lie on
 and wind, and wind and glisten
and harps
 writing shadows in the golden sky.

Lantern; orgasm. Silence.
 Later, perhaps, the holy moon.

Paper flowers hid flies,
props floating over the dust.

Bombs X’d the precise spot
between now and nails.

Still humming, night air
played from a vent in the wall.

And down, dust-marked, surprise
made lips reach to the ground.

Under the quiet spoil, all the glamor
(the odor of flowers) scooped wraiths:

soft, beautiful strangers.

at grandmother’s house, watching
sliced-open figs
 plump, ooze fertile seeds and sugar

self-medicating: sage   parsley ginger
boiled, burning, taste of root-flesh tattooed
 along esophagus, abdominal knots
shifting shape, kaleidoscope, always
heavy,   bright pomegranates

their husks nothing but fists
 filled with blood   the figs
placentas undone, the cats clawing
the trash bags
 screaming in the night

Once you sell your horses
you’re never the same.

That’s not necessarily true,
just an attempt to say

the unsayable as loud
as the wounded frog

roaring across the valley
from a roadside ditch.

Crossing the river into The Cheese Kingdom,
the wind tugs your steering, and I turn to face the crowd

of white caps applauding my half-a-lifetime achievement
award in the category of idolatrous indecisiveness.

I scratch the back of your head, baseline of my serenity.
If I were a theist, I’d say this is how God reveals himself,

refreshing my homepage of expectation. Coffee, the minor
American god of Mondays, delivers us from boredom.

A rustling way back there,
a slight sound.
Something
that moves around.
Trees. Shrug the wind
through, over the pale spill
of ice into a purloined
distance. Outside,
the crepuscular
cries of what remains.
Not starlings but maybe.
An incessant cackle.
Teeth. Against a darkness.
Milkweed casts out its seeds.
Snow drifts down. Wings
spiral around.
A glass slowly filling.
Fallen in stray shafts
over the fescue fields,
wintered light still
cleaves an afternoon.