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.
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