pretend to reveal everything. We revolved
around ourselves as if we were central, the way
the earth was, which is not, like this plain
sun lights between the Taos Mountains and Jemez
Now, move a little to the west. Seasons are
an amulet against the heartbreak of things not unique
dulling loss by flowerings, the columbine
that died back. A rite of passage is the first
winter, we need to survive meeting strangers
as pulsating light and not explosions, the way
a flower, as “the culmination of a plant”
expresses its seductive intent
6
Color is an aspect of the light on a face
and on the pale gash of a washout in the hills
like spans of window glass on winter sky
The hue of vapors is revealed through a filter
of clouds with soulful articulation. We see
blue shadows on peaks normally glittering
with snow. I learned the palette
of diffuse days. Positive tones, finely altered
are silence and distance. In curtained rooms
a pulse beats in prisms on the floor
Other days one goes out adorned and sunburnt
All the more precious a veined wing
Undiluted brightness is an aspect with heroic
edges, in spite of common immersion in sun
as from the lover's face, veiled or aggressive
along a large but rhythmic wave. As with
land, one gets a sense of the variations
though infinite, and learns to make references
7
Please stay a little longer, at least
until the garden is turned, our old whimsical
siege on arid land, where I have seen snow peas
and columbine, even though not inert growth
Extra effort to keep a flowering vine as it is
entropy, is locked into our memory, since
we'd naively assumed flowering was natural
A sprout against its seed coat is the first
battle, after the one with air. All the seeds
seem to fall near the enemy. If I have failed
to grow herbs in a knot, as in English gardens
some motley hardy ones may take, and buckle
the topsoil with incompatible roots. Please
stay. Help me pace out the field for blue corn
If a winter has seemed to pass as only our shadows
on a rough wall, weren't they blank and rough
as apple petals blown over and over each other
to drift in heaps on the porches?
The Constellation Quilt
She stitched her story on black
silk patches from the mourning dress, quaint
as our novels will seem, but we still recognize
tonight's sky, as if there were a pattern
whose edges compose with distance, like nebulae
or namings, so triangles become Orion
Horse, Morning Star, not flanks and wings imagined
in gases, or story pieced out of intervals
from which any might grow, as if sparks ever
scatter the same, or a name assume one face
and stance, dated in cross-stitch in a corner
Stitching a name like defoliate in white thread
on white fabric leaves the leaf empty. In that
century, it was a giraffe or a bear's act. Sometimes
the only pattern seems shock waves advancing
in parallel fanned lines, leaving a tide's debris
whose pattern is moon, cryptic as if there were none
the one safe assumption. Littlest sisters eclipsed
are each another story of a marriage, using the same
scraps for different constellations, Bear, Swan
overlapping.
The Heat Bird
1
A critic objects to their “misterian” qualities
I look it up and don't find it, which must relate
to the mystères in religions. Stepping across stones in the river, which covers my sound, I startle a big bird who must circle the meadow to gain height. There is a din of big wings. A crow loops over and over me. I can see many feathers gone from its wing by sky filling in, but it's not the big bird I walk into the meadow to find what I've already called an eagle to myself. At first you just notice a heap like old asphalt and white stones dumped
2
There is a curving belly. The cow's head is away from me
Its corpse is too new to smell, but as an explanation
hasn't identified my bird. Twice I'm not sure if light wings
between some bushes are not light through crow feathers
but then I really see the expansive back swoop down
and circle up to another cottonwood and light
It's a buzzard with a little red head. You say
that's good. They're not so scarce anymore. It should
have been more afraid of me
3
Fresh wind blows the other way at dawn, so
I'm free to wonder at the kind of charge such a mass
of death might put on air, which is sometimes clear
with yellow finches and butterflies. That poor heap
is all sleeping meat by design with little affect
I decide in a supermarket, whose sole mystere is an evocative creak in a wheel. Not unlike a dead stinkbug on the path, but unlike a little snake I pass over All night I pictured its bones for a small box of mine Today I remembered, on my last night you wanted to linger after the concert, drinking with other couples like a delicate dragonfly
4
And I can't predict your trauma. Potent and careless
as radiation here, which we call careless, because
we don't suspect anything. Then future form is in doubt
Like a critic I thought form was an equilibrium
which progressed by momentum from some original reduction
of fear to the horizon. But my son's thigh bones
are too long. I seduced myself. I thought
I'll give it a little fish for the unexpected. Its paw
moved. My back-bones are sparking mica on sand
now, that carried messages up and down
5
Glass