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"High Desert", "Love Poem on a Glacier", & "Fifth Water" by Melissa Jean



HIGH DESERT


Dusk, and the moon

is three-quarters full and

bright as a harpsichord note in the sky.

And lightning flashes on both horizons

and the sagebrush is high

and the yarrow is like a mirror

for the moon, and a bird sings, and then

a human voice rises singing from the hilltop,

and I don’t know whose voice it is and also

I do: it’s my voice and the bird’s and the lightning’s

and the yarrow’s. It grows darker.

Clouds float over the moon, glowing.

The human voice stops,

and also it keeps going.



LOVE POEM ON A GLACIER


It’s how your hair is a river

in the wind, or it’s how

the cold air freezes us

starkly into

this moment and only this moment;

no other moments are possible

in this kind of cold, just here,

just now.


It’s how your eyes see like mine,

open wide, moved

by streaks of color in a pale sky;

it’s how we both hear the same

something in the wind

and turn to look at each other,

wide-eyed.


Today we will stand in the spray

of a waterfall, awake, thrilled,

and later we will 

dip our bodies into cold water

then hot water, skin prickling in the heat,

and then later, steamed, relaxed,

freshened, we will discover

each other like it’s

the first time.


Every time

the first time.


Your eyes the color of this glacier.

Your hair the shape of water.



FIFTH WATER


In October, when the leaves were flames

and the sky burned brightest blue,

I climbed a trail with my children—teenagers, now,

and much faster at climbing than me—

to mountain hot springs.

Neon blue creek water, steam hovering.

hot clouds in cold air. Stones rust-slick, trees, grasping.


At the top of the boiling creek, a cold waterfall. My son

went straight to it, hid behind the curtain of water.

He jumped from cold to hot to cold to hot,

his face bright, his skin pinkening.


Two little-big hearts, flush and happy in the pools, 

both neither child nor adult, both adult and child,

balanced on the edges of the rocks and on the cusp

of the rest of their lives. These liminal spaces

between the extremes, I tell them, are, ecologically, 

where new things most love to flare

into existence. Hot and cold. Dry and wet.


Red and blue and orange and yellow spilling into

and over each other, colors running like water and becoming, 

always, who they are. The air crisp, the pine needles sharp.

Buckets of golden light.




Melissa Jean is a mindfulness studies professor, forest bathing guide, and creative writing teacher. She currently lives in Nashville.

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