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Adamant
Deer browse at sunrise in an apple orchard,
while honey locust leaves litter the walk.
A neighbor hears gunshots in the bosque
and wonders who's firing at close range;
I spot bear prints near the Pojoaque River
but see no sign of the reported mountain lion.
As chlorophyll slips into the roots of a cottonwood
and the leaves burst into yellow gold, I wonder,
where's our mortal flare? You can travel
to where the Tigris and Euphrates flow together
and admire the inventions of people living
on floating islands of reeds; you can travel
along an archipelago and hike among volcanic
pools steaming with water and sulfuric acid;
but you can't change the eventual, adamant body.
Though death might not come like a curare-
dipped dart blown out of a tube or slam
at you like surf breaking over black lava rock,
it will come—it will come—and it unites us—
brother, sister, boxer, spinner—in this pact,
while you inscribe a letter with trembling hand.
Westbourne Street
Porch light illuminating white steps, light
over a garage door, darkness inside windows—
and the darkness exposes the tenuous.
A glass blower shapes a rearing horse
that shifts, on a stand, from glowing orange
to glistening crystal; suddenly the horse
shatters into legs, head, body, mane.
At midnight, “Fucking idiot!” a woman yells,
shaking the house; along a hedge,
a man sleeps, coat over head, legs sticking out;
and, at 8 am, morning glories open
on a fence; a backhoe heads up the street.
From this window, he views banana leaves,
an orange tree with five oranges, house
with shingled roofs, and steps leading
to an upstairs apartment; farther off, palm trees,
and, beyond, a sloping street, ocean, sky;
but what line of sight leads to revelation?
Black Center
Green tips of tulips are rising out of the earth—
you don’t flense a whale or fire at beer cans
in an arroyo but catch the budding
tips of pear branches and wonder what
it’s like to live along a purling edge of spring.
Jefferson once tried to assemble a mastodon
skeleton on the White House floor but,
with pieces missing, failed to sequence the bones;
when the last speaker of a language dies,
a hue vanishes from the spectrum of visible light.
Last night, you sped past revolving and flashing
red, blue, and white lights along the road—
a wildfire in the dark; though no one
you knew was taken in the midnight ambulance,
an arrow struck a bull’s eye and quivered
in its shaft: one minute gratitude rises
like water from an underground lake,
another dissolution gnaws from a black center.