I'm going to read a long one right now, which
is a love poem that I wrote over the course of five years.
And by the end of those five years,
the relationship had changed form.
But it remains in my mind a love poem
about the difficulties of practicing love
with another person and all the ways the world imposes on that.
"Dearth-light."
"Now, incoming between one desert and another,
I recognize the edges, parting and clear.
I dip my hand into the bath, over your hair.
I ask you not to shave.
I ask, open the hair and skin blades, open the river.
And your great eye opens over a ruined field.
From here, geography extends a labored pulse, more music,
palmed casings.
This love story-- a horse still drunk from war,
where I am a incredible absence of her jaw.
A soft pink gaining.
You say, 'There there's no name for a horse.'
Hear how she rises from every passing wound.
The officers gouged Jasper eyes from the mud, I love you.
Dearth, irrational, makes empty the Valley,
from elongated shadows, pulp of her desire.
When this happens, we must love ourselves fiercely,
the ancestors and lost humans declared.
The human who was wearing the hat of a particular sports
team, the human who dropped their hair comb, the human who
thought she would reach Utah by Tuesday.
Only deserts witnessed the slow and complete life
of water, a story of justice and foraged box springs.
The one sound offered wandering night without horizon.
Each exceeds its genre while remaining truly intact.
This epic has no hero but flesh, which defies imagination.
The carrion, large birds fear, ambulant and calling your name.
Foregrounding and comments for what
hinges beyond a thorough wound.
Likely to suffer, my gift stumbles graft with sores.
Bring me the officer's music.
Bring me the landscape gouged from your eyes.
Low basin flora.
Verdant inching vertebral ache, a warm anatomy to feel
threatened.
Endangered by thick muscled and in danger of iridescent over.
And in the tissue between floodplains and the officer's
science.
And the quiet between and want for shade, the hooded eyes
and fluid body.
Gentle body for whom I lie down.
Tonight I walk the dog, committing
to memory, the darkened color and shape of each car to pass.
So it must have been for the first stars to harvest light
from what they followed.
I've placed a shotgun on layaway,
a service I haven't used since I was 12,
having unlearned to be ashamed of needing time or not
knowing how to use it.
Knowing the distinction harbored in the officer's heart,
perceiving it through its disciplinary veils.
The horse stamps out from waxy brush, viral smell, and the cuts
up her thighs; tell me, baby duck,
your wrecked, unsleeping door.
Love, if you are where I am.
Even your smallest of errors, your most wrecked door.
The rock faces are opened, the genres
are all up for aerial eradication.
To the 40-year-old fish, to the abundant bufflehead
and ringneck ducks drifting south across the sunset,
I love you.