. . . . do not clean my grave keep, rather scatter with autumn, debris, one kind, trampled by white horses,
litter with wind-sifted husks of broken pupae, that coffin sound, favor shadows or favor
breath thorned wand of Russian olive, whirlwind
captured leaf (cottonwood, drifted for miles on thermals) waiting on my burying . . . . ground, devil-
dancing through dust, coyote scat, stone fractured, or melt of your shadow following me,
this morning’s tone. In gone moments
underground, before light, slow currents of desert fog drifting down the Rio Tesuque, fed
by the inversion’s downslip off the mesas, is what I saw when I turned my eyes back
across the barrancas toward you: canyons filled with colts
working the water we have never walked through. Under bell-tolls I continue
to marvel the difference between cognizance and knowledge, the imagined
body, apprehension filtered by senses other than sight, copper scent of blood, pewter
scent of love, odor of sex like wet aspen. After the fires, stopped . . . . is the new-growth
aspens’ offspring or clones of seared ancestors? Heart ash, fragile as tears,
the eyes, or the way you bare your teeth when you shape the beginning
of your cry, or take back your breath . . . one craved favor, taste of skin under tongue,
one clean kept grave