I'll go from the last poem.
That's a big old volume.
It's a labyrinth.
279.
279, all right.
Are you going to sing, I sing you back?
I was not.
Yeah, I think you should.
OK so this is the last part of "The Flood Song."
I" walk my hair's length over tire ruts,
crush seedpods with thumbnails, push kernels of corn
into doves nests on the gnarled branches of our drowned lungs.
Mining saguaro our pulp from garden rock,
squeezing coarse black hair, I arrive
at a map of the face buried in spring snow.
With a plastic cup I scrape the enamel chips of morning songs
from the kitchen sink, and breathe through my eyelids,
glimpsing the thawing of our flat world.
I dial into the blue skin of the map's stiff pulse,
emeralds spill from the skull's cavernous wail,
but nightfall is still darkest in the middle stanza
of the poem arching 20 miles past forgiveness.
The poem held out to the wind speaks juniper
to the wilderness, as August slithers
into September's copper pipes searching
for the Paw prints of a waterfall on the minds lunar
surface.
Here, I read nightfall into the roan's black mane.
Here, I peel a paper mask from the hare's moist cartilage.
Here, tornadoes twist into the loom's black yarn,
but the premonition beginning with three masks and cross,
still mushrooms over the groans of husbands and wives
folding their petals outward from their salt-coated bodies
saying, nihi yazhi, nihaaneendza, nihi yazhi,
nihaaneendza.
Our child, you have returned to us.
Our child, you have returned to us."
Thank you so much.