resume
slicing poppy bulbs and draining resin.
A caretaker checks on his clients’ lawns
and swimming pools. The army calls —
he swerves a golf cart into a ditch —
the surf slams against black lava rock,
against black lava rock — and a welt
spreads across his face. Hunting for
a single glow-in-the-dark jigsaw piece,
we find incompletion a spark.
We volley an orange Ping-Pong ball
back and forth: hungers and fears
spiral through us, forming a filament
by which we heat into cesium light.
And, in the flowing current, we slice
back and forth — topspin, sidespin —
the erasure of history on the arcing ball.
Snow on the tips of forsythia dissolves
within hours. A kestrel circles overhead,
while we peer into a canyon and spot
caves but not a macaw petroglyph.
Yesterday, we looked from a mesa tip
across the valley to Chimayó, tin roofs
glinting in sunlight. Today, willows
extend one-inch shoots; mourning cloaks
flit along the roadside; a red-winged
blackbird calls. Though the March world
leafs and branches, I ache at how
mortality fissures the lungs:
and the pangs resemble ice forming,
ice crystals, ice that resembles the wings
of cicadas, ice flowers, drift ice, ice
that forms at the edges of a rock
midstream, thawing hole in ice, young
shore ice, crack in ice caused by the tides.
Scissors snip white chrysanthemum stalks —
auburn through a black tea-bowl rim —
is water to Siberian irises as art
is to life? You have not taken care
of tying your shoes — a few nanoseconds,
a few thousand years — water catlaps
up the Taf Estuary to a boathouse —
herring shimmer and twitch in a rising net —
rubbing blackthorn oil on her breasts —
in a shed, words; below the cliff, waves —
where å i åa ä e ö means island in the river —
while a veteran rummages through trash,
on Mars, a robot arm digs for ice —
when the bow lifts from the D string,
“This is no way to live,” echoes in his ears.
Sandhill cranes call from the marsh,
then, low, out of the southwest,
three appear and drop into the water:
their silhouettes sway in the twilight,
the marsh surface argentine and black.
Before darkness absorbs it all, I recall
locks inscribed with lovers’ names
on a waist-high chain extending along
a path at the top of Yellow Mountain.
She brushes her hair across his chest;
he runs his tongue along her neck —
reentering the earth’s atmosphere,
a satellite ignites. A wavering line
of cars issues north out of the bosque.
The last shapes of cranes dissolve
into vitreous darkness. Setting aside
binoculars, I adjust the side-view
mirror — our breath fogs the windshield.
A complex of vibrating strings:
this hand, that caress, this silk
gauze running across your throat,
your eyelids, this season where
tiny ants swarm large black ones
and pull apart their legs. Hail shreds
the rows of lettuces beyond the fence;
water, running through sprinklers,
swirls. A veteran’s wince coincides
with the pang a girl feels when
she masters hooked bows in a minuet.
And the bowing is a curved line,
loop, scrawl, macaw in air. A red-
winged blackbird nests in the dark;
where we pruned branches, starlight
floods in over the earth’s curvature.
Begging near a car window, a girl with a missing arm —
Mynah bird sipping water out of a bronze bowl sprinkled with jasmine petals —
Twitching before he plays a sarangi near the temple entrance, a blind man —
Compass Rose
Compass Rose
1 ARCTIC CIRCLE
If the strings of a ¾ violin
are at rest, if the two horsehair
bows repose in their case —
the case holds the blue of lakes
and the whites of snow;
she posts on a horse inside a barn;
rain splatters on the skylight
during the night; she inhales
the smell of newly born chickens
in a stall — if the interval
between lightning and thunder
is a blue dagger, if she hears
Gavotte in D Major as he drives
in silence past Camel Rock —
she stirs then drifts into feathered
waves of sleep; a healer rebuilds
her inner moon and connection
to the earth while she plays
Hangman with her mother;
she stops running out into the cold
whirlpool dark; behind his eyelids,
green curtains of light shimmer