The only thing I really need to say about this one
is this is one of those innumerable bribes
that we make out in the West and there's a reference here
to the Navajo practice.
When someone in the traditional way, when someone dies
in a home, the house is burned.
The body is taken out through a hole
in the wall which is created just for that purpose.
And the whole idea is so that the dead
don't return to trouble us.
So there's a reference to that.
"Unidentified flowers."
"All morning, you and I took turns
driving through the reservation past trading posts and Navajo
towns.
The smoke rising from tin roofs and makeshift chimneys.
Past two burnt down hogans.
A door driven through each wall before the houses were torched.
So whoever had died there would be confused, unable to return.
You pointed out the flowers.
Weed thick, blooming along the highway.
Their bloom like the haze of another fire.
Dusting the mesas with the cobalt electricity
of their petals whatever they were of whichever family.
By the time we finished everything,
we traced our way home, they had vanished
replaced in the cycle of desert flowers
by the orange and red flames of another species.
We looked for any sign of their petals.
The shining five hours of their lives having
forgotten if we ever knew.
How to identify the perennial stems, leaves, roots.
I should have known when I plucked several,
thinking to preserve them in my book
and they shivered to pieces in my hands,
that they were moving past us as quickly as we drove past them.
Pass the bunched sheep, the pot-bellied dogs,
the houses burning with the fires of the living
and the dead.
Driving, remembering what has been dismembered.
Everything woven together, stitched together only in us."