WEBVTT

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I'm going to read a long
one right now, which

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is a love poem that I wrote
over the course of five years.

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And by the end of
those five years,

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the relationship
had changed form.

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But it remains in
my mind a love poem

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about the difficulties
of practicing love

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with another person and all the
ways the world imposes on that.

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"Dearth-light."

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"Now, incoming between
one desert and another,

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I recognize the edges,
parting and clear.

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I dip my hand into the
bath, over your hair.

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I ask you not to shave.

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I ask, open the hair and
skin blades, open the river.

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And your great eye opens
over a ruined field.

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From here, geography extends
a labored pulse, more music,

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palmed casings.

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This love story-- a horse
still drunk from war,

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where I am a incredible
absence of her jaw.

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A soft pink gaining.

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You say, 'There there's
no name for a horse.'

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Hear how she rises from
every passing wound.

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The officers gouged Jasper
eyes from the mud, I love you.

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Dearth, irrational,
makes empty the Valley,

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from elongated shadows,
pulp of her desire.

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When this happens, we must
love ourselves fiercely,

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the ancestors and
lost humans declared.

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The human who was wearing the
hat of a particular sports

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team, the human who dropped
their hair comb, the human who

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thought she would
reach Utah by Tuesday.

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Only deserts witnessed
the slow and complete life

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of water, a story of justice
and foraged box springs.

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The one sound offered wandering
night without horizon.

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Each exceeds its genre while
remaining truly intact.

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This epic has no hero but
flesh, which defies imagination.

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The carrion, large birds fear,
ambulant and calling your name.

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Foregrounding and
comments for what

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hinges beyond a thorough wound.

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Likely to suffer, my gift
stumbles graft with sores.

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Bring me the officer's music.

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Bring me the landscape
gouged from your eyes.

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Low basin flora.

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Verdant inching vertebral
ache, a warm anatomy to feel

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threatened.

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Endangered by thick muscled and
in danger of iridescent over.

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And in the tissue between
floodplains and the officer's

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science.

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And the quiet between and want
for shade, the hooded eyes

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and fluid body.

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Gentle body for whom I lie down.

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Tonight I walk the
dog, committing

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to memory, the darkened color
and shape of each car to pass.

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So it must have been for the
first stars to harvest light

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from what they followed.

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I've placed a
shotgun on layaway,

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a service I haven't
used since I was 12,

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having unlearned to be
ashamed of needing time or not

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knowing how to use it.

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Knowing the distinction
harbored in the officer's heart,

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perceiving it through
its disciplinary veils.

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The horse stamps out from waxy
brush, viral smell, and the cuts

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up her thighs;
tell me, baby duck,

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your wrecked, unsleeping door.

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Love, if you are where I am.

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Even your smallest of errors,
your most wrecked door.

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The rock faces are
opened, the genres

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are all up for
aerial eradication.

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To the 40-year-old fish,
to the abundant bufflehead

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and ringneck ducks drifting
south across the sunset,

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I love you.

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