the charged, the dangerous:
taffeta rustle of cottonwood skirts,
Orion’s owl, cruising at dusk,
thunderhead rumble. Bone-deep,
scrimshaw each day’s secret.
Now, lighting the sandalwood candle,
gather each strand you recall
and the blue pen, like a needle.
Suture what you can.
I. Portals
. . . where the unthinkable happens
A Lone Bird, Balanced
Riff after riff cascades from a cottonwood—
too bad nobody here speaks Bird anymore.
Oh, for a madcap diva in peacock blue,
her feathered train a ladder of eyes.
Give her a voice that breathes out honey
and arias warm as the primal yawn:
praise unfurled, wingspan wide . . .
Or summon an earnest, mustachioed tenor
whose cedary timbre makes us believe
taproots bebop under our feet,
desert hyacinth bulbs groove, beneath dunes,
while sea wind composes its chorus of stones.
Where is that diva now?
We want a translation for sky
unscrolling this endless score.
And we call for a thousand Bocelli birds
singing acres of wind and cloud
with the breadth of a robe, fallen open.
Exposed
So why do I always spot the homely birds?
Mouse-brown, on those twig feet
you look like a refugee. Are you hurt,
little wife? Are you brooding, as I am,
over the latest spill of blood and feathers,
songless, over the next ravaged nest?
Talk to me. Creak open a pocket-lined wing
concealing a cottontail, a collapsible hat.
Convince me the song of Zion lives, before
the long blue eye of this wind impels us
to shelter where doubt builds its house:
a tatter of leaves,
dust, and greenstick fractures.
She Can Only Try to Compose Herself
The wood thrush at dusk echoes
every day’s hope,
each note a psalm of a self,
a white blossom
where rests fall between sounds
like petals. See the way air
cups a face that it loves, and light
strikes the hollow
curve of the throat, leaving it
speechless.
She Calls Him Dreamer
They both sign up for “Reading the Land.”
He is the summit she fails to map,
a soul built for switchbacks, a seeker
of wind-shaved stone. He straddles
the ridge, beckoning.
She’s his Wild Beauty,
but also answers to Bean, a Great Plains girl,
calm as horizon, a hill unmade.
Sometimes she thinks his veins churn
with glacial silt, clouding his gaze.
“Piece of cake,” he calls.
Stalling
over red laces, extra-long, she criss-crosses
the loose ends on her shins like a dancer,
hoists her frameless Day-Glo-orange pack,
sagging beneath the old Dacron bag,
strapped on,
tight as a budget.
Eerie sounds drown out Dreamer’s instructions.
Bean slow-pivots the compass points. Upwelling
water re-lacquers the lake’s face, new ice
flexing against older layers, a moan,
as if a girl were
trapped beneath.
A dirt-brown bird with fidgets cracks its joke,
like a cocklebur. Eyeing the heights,
she ponders a dozen ways to leave,
cradles a she-cone, each small wing
hopeful as any waving hand.
Next Breath, Best Breath
For starters, don’t call it a cage,
corralling the breath. Savvy fingertips
mutely Braille two dozen ribs,
each commandeering its own space
24–7, salaaming and shifting,
then rising. Selah-h-h-h . . .
Next, re-envision those lungs as an inner atlas:
one hundred routes
funneling
into branch lines,
cloverleafs,
cul de sacs.
Wild as papyrus, they might be
a psalter. A Rorschach. A centerfold.
Or call them dual panniers
flanking a breastbone,
an albino koi kissing a mirror,
all lips and flared silk.
Now, boneless as a cat at rest,
inhabit that next inhale, discerning
how spacious a backbone can be,
freeing shoulders to roll, the head to loll
and lift, floating into place: the body
aligned, alight, a home for the holy.
Blue as Devotion
Some love this world like a secret,
a promise, a sacred tease:
500 shades of blue—sea glass or sky,
sapphire, jade, night. Cool hues
play the rogue, retreat from our squint
while come-hithering, luminous
as the quiet splice of shadows and twilight,
fickle as evening tide’s invocation
and benediction.
How many ways can one soul taste
what