Bone-white moon, mottled with dark marrow.
An ancient skull to startle a winter eye.
Walking on spines of desert mountains,
holding the climber one step back from flying with hawk
and vulture, owl and eagle, who soar on tides of heat,
over the rims of castle canyons, and down
to white bones of coyote and deer.
The ribs of dead cactus that trap a pregnant moon,
to the closed and huddled, the dream-brush bodies on a floor
where sand runs slow.
All night, the climber lifts himself
on the trails of the body, and tumbles back
among the trickling streams, of carbon.
Slow precision, the echo chamber cliffs or ghosts
of stone and wood, gleam under a lulling moon.
Sculptured rocks, inscribed with white veins,
are poised on the grave of love where lovers clamber and haloo
in the echo canyons, calling out to the long dead, who
once felt laughing.
Your hands hold their flesh and sing their praises,
before this curtain of night.