WEBVTT

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I'll go from the last poem.

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That's a big old volume.

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It's a labyrinth.

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279.

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279, all right.

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Are you going to
sing, I sing you back?

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I was not.

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Yeah, I think you should.

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OK so this is the last
part of "The Flood Song."

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I" walk my hair's
length over tire ruts,

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crush seedpods with thumbnails,
push kernels of corn

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into doves nests on the gnarled
branches of our drowned lungs.

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Mining saguaro our
pulp from garden rock,

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squeezing coarse
black hair, I arrive

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at a map of the face
buried in spring snow.

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With a plastic cup I scrape the
enamel chips of morning songs

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from the kitchen sink, and
breathe through my eyelids,

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glimpsing the thawing
of our flat world.

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I dial into the blue skin
of the map's stiff pulse,

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emeralds spill from the
skull's cavernous wail,

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but nightfall is still
darkest in the middle stanza

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of the poem arching 20
miles past forgiveness.

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The poem held out to
the wind speaks juniper

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to the wilderness,
as August slithers

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into September's
copper pipes searching

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for the Paw prints of a
waterfall on the minds lunar

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surface.

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Here, I read nightfall
into the roan's black mane.

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Here, I peel a paper mask from
the hare's moist cartilage.

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Here, tornadoes twist into
the loom's black yarn,

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but the premonition beginning
with three masks and cross,

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still mushrooms over the
groans of husbands and wives

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folding their petals outward
from their salt-coated bodies

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saying, nihi yazhi,
nihaaneendza, nihi yazhi,

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nihaaneendza.


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Our child, you have
returned to us.

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Our child, you have
returned to us."

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Thank you so much.

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