This morning I saw yellow in the bushes at the skirt of the house, an elimination of reds and blues, a distortion of green. It was a shallow color, speedy, and hours later I determined that it had been a coyote digging for mice or ground hogs or moles.
In the desert, I remember greens, greens that accrued into the distance seemingly forever outward where the margins of the senses are obscured and obfuscate and purple mountains rise like the shoulders of the dead.
I studied the ad Herennium, that great Rhetoric so heavy on Gaius’s lap and grinned over by Valla, dreaming of that Cicero who, dead and buried, had never authored such a manual on theory, imitation and practice, on a mound of stones in the desert, syncopating to the larks and dragon flies, who, I’ve learned, can dart five seconds faster than time.
Orating into the wind. Playing duration like a thick-stringed, catgut harp. I turned love into a poem and it became something else; it became a snake, a compass, a ten year destination after ten years of war written onto a yellow pad; upon reading, the reader will imagine the gray bottom of the empty sea, maybe shoe prints, a bag of oranges, red crabs scrambling like ants among the cat tails, combustibility inside the paper-dry leaf pile.
If I could walk forever, I would; I’d plant thin wounds into the earth at every mile marker and look back, imagine returning to the place I started, where purple mountains rise above the wind-worn entablements and the larks and dragon flies print shadows outside gaps in the stones, which is how bees are made.
I will write you in reverse order, spell you backward, so everyone will remember.
