Gravity

What he said to himself was
distill it. That is, remember it.

When the clouds came from out of the face
of the stars looking something like
her face, he stood in the pour, in the rain,
trying to puzzle it out as it shifted,

thought of the child growing inside of her.

Found himself looking at the moon
in a puddle later. And the moon
looking differently radiant.

Wondering how it would fill him now.

Then watched the moon coming in on the rain
through the soil flowing into
limestone chambers at the heart.

Hearing that silver motion
coming into that sudden quiet
and settling out in small ripples
and vast darkness.

You want angels, too?
: The blind of wings slashed through
by wind and light like bars. Yes, like bars.
As though everything was abruptly solid.
: The flames against the tree’s
rough bark. Around the tree’s black bark.
: What wind, what light. : I think
I never saw the light like this
in the Cordillera. When I didn’t know
what young was. : How I knew
the girl in Tinqui by the way
she held blue gentians and let the goats
nuzzle her small, hard palms. :
That she could not speak by the way
she loved the ravens and still
did not envy them the sky or flight, :
but saw them in their stuttered luster,
their wings hard against the light
like bars across the wind. :
Like time, a stick across
the slatted world. : What
wind, what light. And wings, fire. :
These blazing parishioners of life.

Texas Porchlight

Sometimes she wears her beauty like a scar
whose story is obscure and violent.
As though within the light of her cheekbones
the gold east Texas porchlight on the man’s
breaking skull still radiates. As though
the yellow of the rooms within the house
where she stood watching the bat come down
inside the circled men or the sound
of that opening in the hot, locust night
is in her mouth, behind her thin carved lips.
But this is not about pity nor are her eyes,
which glisten here like the stones sang
in the stream behind her house
in Oregon in winter. Where the rain
made the whole land hymn as it decayed.
And this is not about echoing, nor
how water carries all the ridge
downhill with it. It is about the power
of powerlessness, the way things form
from what flows through them. Not
the ridge coming down, but the banks
standing up. The secant life, tangent
dreams, the geometry of witness,
the geography of loss building within,
pushing its terrific, silencing beauty out.

Schrodiger’s Cat

In Utah, there are men trapped belowground
as machines bore down toward them
and the newspapers shriek and oscillate.

Once, I would have said that both
not only could be, but actually were true:

that the men were standing in the inhaling dark
watching the blooms of their headlamps flail
against the earth’s constriction,

and that the crush of coal and stone
had already consumed them
until we could carve back that mouth.

Expose the breath or the black.

But now we know that the star
goes out after thirty million years
of light traveling toward a stop.

Its last ripple laughing at nothing.

Not even our faith in it. Not
the possibility of return, or of orbits
not ending, of circles beginning.

God’s death, they say, was long ago.

The sun continues its strange wobble west
at its long fixed distance, and night comes.

In Utah, there are men belowground.

Flowers of flesh, flowers of bone.

Semaphore

It now was winter and the moths were all dead,
just when he had need for their metaphor.
He and the woman in the yellow kitchen,
unable to hear themselves. Beating
at something between them.

If it were summer, he thought,
this would not be happening. The moths
would be at the windows, their wings
clapping the glass, antennae scraping the panes
at the unspeakable distance between
themselves always and the light.

And he would point to them and she
would understand, would look up from the knife
and cloves of garlic on the cutting board,
those bulbs like fire across the wood,
and would understand.

Behind them, the stars ticked down the sky
in their nightly failure. He noted their semaphore:
thin bands of light, combustion. And he went quiet.

House Rock Valley, AZ

The white breath starting in only
after the dark exhale of birth. That’s
what day is here, and what night is

while in the tongue of sand, in the dry wash
the tamarisk lifts its thousand snarls
to the condor in the sky. Which hangs

like death’s finger against the blue, then falls
inside you like a stone. And at night,
in that push the dark makes out all night

the kangaroo rat follows the path
he makes. Like the river singing
about sacrifice. Against the way

the borders of our lives press in
on us all day. The antelope strung
through the barbed wire fence.

Rockfall. And the wind rising
above the sound of the highway,
which is like the feel of saltbrush

across your fingers. Though I want it
to be the hair on a dead cow. The cleft
air, the shadow beneath the falling block

of stone. The sound of gravity and ruin.
Because this place claws me open wide. Cleaves
me apart like prayer, like breath. And rolls

the boundaries back. The Colorado River
over there. The Vermilion Cliffs. The Kaibab
at my back, in its constant lying down.