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2.
One day the moon and a moth collided.
The white sky burst with red rain, filling rivers
with wing dust, smoke, and the candles
we once lit as a soft language
to draw our lost children in from the dark.

The bird flies through three surfaces:
earth, water, and forgetting. But it isn’t only one
bird. Thousands, millions, browns, blues,
transparencies, rose, quiet, loud,
shallow, trustworthy, with eyebrows
like wire, eyes like something fermented
in a bottle. They yammer in crock pots.
Get into the flour and fly off looking
like odd hand signals outside the window
of a moving car. When you tell them to stay still,
they shake. When you tell them to shake,
they break an egg and spray you with yokes.
Build a white floor and you’ll find black
ink prints raced from door to door,
cabinet to cabinet, and no more croutons
for the salad come company.
They line the roads
with their wings hung like laundry
and vote minutes before the polls close.

A side of them is a square.
Another side is a circle.
Yet another side happened yesterday
when a tree fell, wherever it fell.
And each side has its infinite degrees
and infinite times, such that an eye blink
in one hundred years may be confused
for a kind word one thousand years
before the invention of transistors.

The bird turns, breaks between the branches.
It leaves black trails through smoke,
wind, earth, water, and fog. The bird
leaves us wondering at footprints,
small writings in tree skin, at how many
birds there can be in one bird,
whether any shape or collection
of shapes, colors and surfaces
will migrate into a vast animal in flight,
perhaps as massive as all matter
collected forever, and collecting
and still collecting, until the bird
blinks and we stumble and fall
into a cold lake and forget
the million surfaces of a bird.
Again.

As she turned the bend
she painted an army swarming
the limestone cliffside with ropes.
Each soldier wore a different
color (and face). They made a star pack,
a thick cluster of whites and greens,
silver armaments taking each a piece
of the moon and reflecting
it back to her from a million
different centuries.

On the horizon Mars rose
slowly, Jupiter studied bears,
Pluto waved from a leaf tip,
and a white owl slumbered
in a night tree. She swerved
to avoid a rat wearing
a feathered cap who raised his fist
to her alien plates. “I’m on the road
like you, carrying all my crap,”
he called. “I’m venturing
like you to find a woman
who lives in a cave.
Have you seen her?”

She will hear nothing
of this, now, imagining an owl’s
shadow on the river,
red mesas under bear and tiger
patterns, children
packing capguns
on the street corners,
and every clover leaf
as one leaf, outlined
as sharp as a charcoal
smile on polished
limestone against
life’s greenest puzzle.

In Mexico she purchased
an obsidian knife
from a vendor with an eye
the color of whale bone.
When she holds it
she can still see three
of his blinks in the black
chisel scallops so that
–in that blade–
she paints thirty eyes
emerging all at once
to watch her with.

She put her foot
on the brake, slowed.
She lowered the window.
Soon the rat appeared
at that space, drawing
in big drinks of air,
(somewhat tired
from scaling the door
with a rope and a grapple).
He squeaked suspiciously,
“So you’ll take me to find her.
Somewhere out there?”
and he pointed ahead
into the night.

“Yes,” she said, “For
as long as it lasts. But
what about the armies?”
The rat hoped into the passenger
seat, clicked his safety
belt securely, and said
“Not armies you see but the light
that’s waited a billion years
for the warm limestone
and the moonlight in the eyes
of a woman passing through
the hills.” “Oh,” the woman
said. “I didn’t know rats
had such thoughts.”
“We should go,”
the rat said. “I hear there
are green tigers in these parts.”

“Don’t worry,” she said.
“I have a knife for protection
and many miles yet to drive
before stopping for a bed.”
They moved on past
the limestone. In the mirror,
she saw quiet millions turn
at the cliff top to watch
her and the rat go. Pluto waved
from a leaf tip oh so barely
moved by the sound
of the wind and the deep
green sky roused, opened its eyes,
and released the milk
white owl into the night.

The man with a river in his head will find himself on a long stretch between Roswell and Carlsbad where scarlet creeper, morning glory, and orange butterfly weed fire the space between the shoe tips and the longest shadows of the light when evening comes to the desert.

Night is painted by the sun, the wind humbled by beatings of the bees’ wings in those spaces between the stones where, look closely, a red bear stops to listen, an orange tiger flaps an ear at the bees and the road goes east and west like the river in a man’s mind who, for a moment only, briefly, for any more would stop the heart, is stunned at the thought of a thousand herons, scared to flight, assembling the sky.

“On some worlds water splashes up, dashing over
the fingers of trees.” That’s what she told me from the river
that runs east to west to the entrance where her cave
made a small hole in the mountain. “I’ve seen
little blue people crowd onto limbs as thick as buses.
The sun curls, winks on the water’s deep white thickness.
It falls through small spaces in purple beaded sage,
through willow leaning for a drink, waving with the wind
as the rust and russet fish dart down the pipe
like dust on the back of autumn leaves, DNA on snow.”
Through what else does the sun fall, I wanted to know.
“I won’t tell you that,” she spoke. “But I’ll say that
the sun sprinkles the ground under creosote bush.
It confuses ants into thinking that honey is dry as light
until they remember why they came to this place
for dew eventually dries by seven on the hot mornings
(thanks for the fish, the seeds, the raspberries, by the way).

“From planes you can see the ragged shadows of clouds on fields
checkerboarding the world. But the ants don’t know
aircraft. They’ll learn soon enough that the light
they keep running through is moving away from them
no matter how much they wish it were honey or sugar cube.”
I took up three raspberries and crushed them in my
palm. The old woman watched as my finger wrote
red on the limestone at her feet, “There are no rivers
that run east to west here, and rivers don’t end
at the mouths of caves.” She in turn crushed, wrote,
“The river oaks paint shade for the trout in the water.
Their leaves turn purple when the sun falls behind
the hills.” She licked the fruit from her dirty nail.
A trout’s tail curled at the corner of her mouth.
I gave her my finger and she lapped the ink from it.
I wiped the smear from her lips with a handkerchief.
When I turned to leave, the sun rose like an orange
finger smudge over the red mesa and the mist in the blue
canyon deeps drifted like weightless bird flocks. I hear her
laugh at the edge of the water. Her voice slaps on the river
like stones. Evening comes calm. Sun fish rest in the shallows.
“Come back when you’re able,” she called. “Bring
raspberries, fish, and next time dawn in a sealed cup.
We’ll use these to make squares” “Rivers” “Dogs”
“Bread and wine” “Surf and notes” “Ship masts”
“Love in winter time” “Gladness in the river reds”
“Peace in green of leaves” “Azure fishswarms in trees”
. . .

I still remember how the sand crunched under my shoes
when I paused on the top of the mountain with water enough
and bird call and stone became a quality of loft.

Black, pink birds raced downslope like the quick tips of brushes
painting arcs and the wind rushed up from the penciled grid
of the dim and hazy city where all sound become whale form.

Here the islands of spanish dagger thinned and silver bushes
shook in the breathing of the high air where one restrains the eyes
up for fear of tumbling back. Far west, a smoke stack

pointed a flat black horn at Arizona. Southeast rose
gray refinery smoke that lay flat and brown, soon for Mexico
when the breeze turns. One could smell the spark of cold-rolled

steel, yes, steel bundles rolled through the sky from the North
like gods’ wigs, their shadows wider and grayer than cities.
This is the last place one wants to be when storms come.

I still remember how the sand crunched under my shoes
as I ran with the birds downslope with water enough
pounding the stones and red mud racing and the city

grid wet and smokewashed and gray as whale forms, the spanish
dagger slashing at my pants. The brindle bushes rattled
and the gods’ drums broke wild, cracking the stone, as the high

air became solid like the mountain and a canyon opened
to me seconds later and I leaped out as yet more lightning filled
its stony bottom then went black as a mouse eye.

I’ve never stopped falling and birds still drop downslope
like the fast tips of pens drawing back-looking faces,
crowds of pink, black and green birds chasing the wind.

I still remember how the sand crunched under my shoes.
How all this is falling perpetual and how the minds of storms
never sleep and the sun shines always elsewhere and the lure
of stone becomes shadow under a tree and a whale call in the clouds.

June 6

on a scented night
long ago
the god came down
from a hill and found
the moon settled on a pond

the god got down close
and ran a finger
through the moon’s middle
calling forth the peony

from then on, the flower
does not know
it’s a moon on water
and the moon wonders
why the earth is so near

we see it fluffed
and frilled because
the god has yet to blink

her finger forever wet
on a night that never ends