In the dry wash

Wondering if this is the way the poem is
always an avoidance

to write “I like dressing
for the weather,” in flood of omission, next to “even 

when all the clothes just get soaked

through”

a dearer truth, that sentences
may contain some of the light of what desired them
even made carelessly

one word will stand for another

and flicker alongside it at a run

as the roadside might blur and still remain

a cherished thing

when in the light of it

tomorrow, in Mimbres

delphinium

bedded down 

underfoot

Fidelity

We had to put the cormorant into a box. Separate the motion from the regular functions of the arm. What subtleties are worthwhile. We are bundled down into this task. Lining the box with a towel. We have just become used to the warning about the shape of the beak. This behavior is strange and so is ours in the face of it, or at all. Undeniable fidelity, strangeness to itself. Between the rule and the ankle depth in the mud. Sometimes the feeling is obedience and sometimes sadness. Sometimes an anomaly even amongst the strangeness. Long and curved, cylinder of the neck. Leaving the water and going further into the woods. Such strangeness to feel as if an omen. So blanketed the earth in needles. We hadn’t had the time to know what we should do, and we were almost leaving this position. But now returnant.  Between the rule and the feeling. Now that this is so strange and we are somewhat unprepared. I’ve scattered myself among issues of staying before. Spent a day thinking of someone burning the end of a cord with a lighter in cupped hand. Thought myself closer, stoking it. Between the fuller-than-usual river and the rule.

Lying alongside once again

being sudden and having no metered
recourse to the altered lift

thigh in claim of the rug

if trees started falling, and if the weight of me could even help

if things started lifting. Body proposition, we don’t touch it before the critical gust

if it wouldn’t be 

possible there’s no way of changing it now, in the dark, 

wind racing through, so bitter that

stretching down the base of the song
for quality of lowness

women behind the
telling

like checking to see if the chrysalis

moves separate from the leaf

voice too long for the song

the monarch’s wings are described as rumpled

its legs are “actually very blue”

a love of pure action

so it is that geranium,
scarlet gilia, cedar, straw wattle banked

upon the stomach

that sex is made of almost nothing

our true problem not being
in the same proximity to weather