This poem is called "Moving Again."
At night, the mountains look like huge dim hens.
In a few geological eras, new mountains
may shatter the Earth's shell and poke up like stone wings.
Each part must serve for a whole.
I bring my sons to the base of the foothills
and we go up from a scruff of Ponderosa pines We startled.
God, he swerves of magpies who settle in our rising wake.
Then there's a booming prickly pear.
"Jesus, Dad.
What's that?"
Willie asks.
It's like a yellow tulip grafted to a cactus.
It's a beautiful wound the cactus puts out to bear fruit
and to be healed.
If I lived with my sons all year I'd
be less sentimental about them.
We go up to the mesa top and look down at our new hometown.
The thin air warps in the melting light,
like the aura before a migraine.
The boys are tired.
A tiny magpie fluffs into a pine far below and farther down
in the valley of child support and lights,
people are opening drawers.
One of them finds a yellowing patch of newsprint
with a phone number penciled on it from Illinois,
from before they moved, before Nicky was born.
Memory is our root system.
Verna, he says to himself, because his wife's
in another room, whose number do you suppose this is?