Coyote skitters between
sagebrush and bright blooming rabbitbrush,
rides beside cracked playa beds
where clay sleeps.
Coyote’s paws are talking,
talking as he walks
right on top of desert floors.
Rabbits huddle close
to themselves, stars of earth surface,
dry land between cacti shifts
while coyote
passes.
.
Map tracks turn
and gather,
leaving little whispers.
I went this way.
I went there.
.
Dusk is watching,
shredding light with early stars,
following coyote west.
.
Stars skip out over the black branches
of screwbean mesquite, catalyzing
coyotes hungry for a breeze,
a rabbit, each other.
.
I would guide your hand across my body
star to star and between each
we would be one in one space.
If you were here I would,
to hear your breath catch
to taste the desert dust
crushed creosote and wolfberries
and the sweat-salt of hunger
hot on our cracked lips.
I would tenderly swing my body
in an arc as wide as Sonoran horizons
to include all of you in my passion,
quiet as midday, bold as midnight
and strong as both
in joined silence.
.
Creosote blooms leak notes the desert air
hangs all the other notes from
to weld a symphony.
.
instinct subverted,
his eyes
catch
tuck tail
ping
off concrete
and return
like some tilted pinball,
traffic quick between.
.
couldn’t be twenty-five
years ago that boy
chained up in gold, blue
tattoes on a skin web
say
hey baby,
leaning easy on a rail
and offering the dollars
tucked in the silk suit,
handkerchief pocket,
winks for all
i’d pull in on a weekend
and laughed
and i laughed right back.
.
that street jam
confidence now melted
by blue boy eyes,
scattered in trimmed treetops
above summer lawns
sprinkled green:
i let that happen.
somewhere lost
the bone knowing
grace of filth
like born on a trust fund.
i wasn’t.
.
suburbs don’t happen –
they ooze,
busting us close
against every hedge
then spitting us out
on the world,
instinct shot.
.
Through small flakes blowing
right up brick building
faces, I walked
down to the sluggish river.
.
Ducks were swimming
across the dark lagoon,
placid paths of wake water
melting behind them.
.
Geese hunkered down
in brush. I joined them,
resting out of the wind,
waiting for something.
.
Like the ragged end
of a goose shot, breath feathers
marking impact’s explosion,
snowflakes swirl down off sky’s
collision with the ground floor air
we breathe. Thunder rumbles, muffled
by the crowded crystals, gentling
through spaces
empty yesterday.
I woke up this morning
as a rose growing
in the red rock cleft
above Denver in ’86,
four hours lost and
years skipped like Arkansas
which doesn’t exist–
he’s got a hand
roving on my hip talking
hard and laughing,
climbers dangling off
red rock off to the left
of the cleft
and I’m in love.
canyon rock sweeps
a mild west curve
by the cottonwood just
drifting toward green with damp
dark against root
tapping two feet down;
where the two red rocks
lie flatly cupped
by wide bedrock
and fox cross daily,
under sheltering sandstone’s mass
overhang, stained by drooling rim
and fire
are stones, dressed and
stacked and fallen
back to earth again,
lying in weak spring sun
like exhausted children
left on the beaches of war.
.
Slim found Guadalcanal
in a storm of metal jackets,
a flash-flood of fear
and he walks the canyon
named for him.
He rustles cottonwood leaves
with fingertips.
He kicks sand
into wind’s posture.
Slim whistles through doors
of shored adobe,
tapping rocks.
His palms are all over the walls.
His feet are all over the sky.
Between ripples
marked by flood is his breath,
there in the troughs.
In the evening he lies quietly
beside the stones,
dressed and stacked and fallen
back to earth again.
.
Each breeze is cold
against ruins whitened by moonlight.
All the pots are broken pots.
and specific.
.
She lost three lovers in Texas
it is such a big state
full of tall hair,
women with trinket cars,
attorneys at law doing Dallas.
Everyone has two bulldozers
called arms.
.
The U.P. is home, frozen
with trees on top.
Birds trickle out of September
and all the love you have
you know you will need.
December is longer than
cars crashing.
.
In Texas,
flint stars
big as her pupils and
she shaved the right side of
all of her head.
On the U.P. that hair grew out.
She rattled borders of her mattress
until northern home frost
settled her down.
.
today when the grass
flattened like downed geese
under the onslaught
of a demon wind, I drew
your missing heart
in the vacated space.
.
the dipped shoulder of love
the torn artery bleeding
into my waiting hand
.
then fed that liquid
back to the soul you stole
(my own)
.
evening dropped the wind
so grass stood up in
the space between my prayers.
your bloodless hands wilted
under darkness, cooling the heat
of vengeance.
In this photograph grass is dirty
blond pelt of earth blown to
bend inland, blown to
bend touch your
flanks the way my hair leaned
in candlelight toward you, your
tender palms currying
my own flanks.
.
In the photograph your black eyes
lock to the lens, keeping you.
.
In this photograph of your lithe
body young by the sea, casual
in its place against earth, intense
in its focus on my hand cradling
a cold camera, every slow
night gone leans inland, arrives
on a new wind
to wake me from age.
orphan poems 