—walking along a ridge of white sand—
                                                      it’s cooler below the surface—

                we stop and, gazing at an expanse
                             of dunes to the west,
                                         watch a yellow yolk of sun drop to the                                                        mountains—

                an hour earlier, we rolled down a dune,
                                                         white sand flecked your eyelids                                                                    and hair—

                a claret cup cactus blooms,
                                          and soaptree yuccas
                                                                      move as a dune moves—

                so many years later, on a coast, waves rolling to shore,
                                          wave after wave,

                I see how our lives have unfolded,
                                          a sheen of
                                                        wave after whitening wave—

                and we are stepping barefoot,
                              rolling down a dune, white flecks on our lips,

                on our eyelids: we are lying in a warm dune
                                                         as a full moon 
                                                                                  lifts against an                                                                                                  ocean of sky—

A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:

           imbibing the silence,

           you stare at spruce needles:

                                 there’s no sound of a leaf blower,

                                 no sign of a black bear;

a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack

           against an aspen trunk;

           a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.    

                      You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:

when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,

but when it stops, it blends in again;

           the world of being is like this gravel:

                      you think you own a car, a house,

                      this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.    

Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams

                      and stood at Gibraltar,

                                            but you possess nothing.

Snow melts into a pool of clear water;

           and, in this stillness,

                      starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.

  The blue-black mountains are etched
   with ice. I drive south in fading light.
   The lights of my car set out before
   me, and disappear before my very eyes.
   And as I approach thirty, the distances
   are shorter than I guess? The mind
   travels at the speed of light. But for
   how many people are the passions
   ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?
   Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman,
   who sells himself a policy on his own life;
   or the magician who has himself locked
   in a chest and thrown into the sea,
   only to discover he is caught in his own chains.
   I want a passion that grows and grows.
   To feel, think, act, and be defined
   by your actions, thoughts, feelings.
   As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray,
   I want the clear white light to work
   against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:
   even if the darkness precedes and follows
   us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.

Meandering across a field with wild asparagus,
I write with my body the characters for grass,
water, transformation, ache to be one with spring.
Biting into watermelon, spitting black seeds
onto a plate, I watch the eyes of an Armenian
accordion player, and before dropping a few
euros into his brown cap, smell sweat and fear.
I stay wary of the red horse, Relámpago, latch
the gate behind me; a thorned Russian olive
branch arcs across the path below my forehead,
and, approaching the Pojoaque River, I recall
the sign, beware pickpockets, find backhoe tracks,
water diverted into a ditch. Crisscrossing
the stream, I catch a lightning flash, the white-
capped Truchas peaks, behind, to the east, and in
the interval between lightning and thunder,
as snow accumulates on black branches,
the chasm between what I envision and what I do.

Just as a blue tip of a compass needle
stills to north, you stare at a pencil

with sharpened point, a small soapstone
bear with a tiny chunk of turquoise

tied to its back, the random pattern
of straw flecked in an adobe wall;

you peruse the silver poplar branches,
the spaces between branches, and as

a cursor blinks, situate at the edge
of loss—the axolotl was last sighted

in Xochimilco over twenty years ago;
a jaguar meanders through tawny

brush in the Gila Wilderness—
and, as the cursor blinks, you guess

it’s a bit of line that arcs—a parsec
made visible—and as you sit,

the imperfections that mark you
attune you to a small emptied flask

tossed to the roadside and the x,
never brewed, that throbs in your veins.

Redwinged blackbirds in the cattail pond—
today I kicked and flipped a wing 
in the sand and saw it was a sheared 
off flicker’s. Yesterday’s rain has left 
			
snow on Tesuque Peak, and the river 
will widen then dwindle. We step 
into a house and notice antlers mounted 
on the wall behind us; a ten-day-old child 
			
looks, nurses, and sleeps; his mother 
smiles but says she cries then cries 
as emptiness brims up and over.  
And as actions are rooted in feelings, 

I see how picking spinach in a field 
blossoms the picker, how a thoughtless act 
shears a wing. As we walk out 
to the car, the daylight is brighter 
			
than we knew. We do not believe 
flames shoot out of a cauldron of days 
but, looking at the horizon, see
flames leap and crown from tree to tree.

The bow of a Muckleshoot canoe, blessed
with eagle feather and sprig of yellow cedar,
is launched into a bay. A girl watches
her mother fry venison slabs in a skillet—
drops of blood sizzle, evaporate. Because
a neighbor feeds them, they eat wordlessly;
the silence breaks when she occasionally
gags, reaches into her throat, pulls out hair.
Gone is the father, riled, arguing with his boss,
who drove to the shooting range after work;
gone, the accountant who embezzled funds,
displayed a pickup and proclaimed a winning
flush at the casino. You donate chicken soup
and clothes but never learn if they arrive
at the south end of the city. Your small
acts are sandpiper tracks in wet sand.
Newspapers, plastic containers, beer bottles
fill bins along the sloping one-way street.

Slanting light casts onto a stucco wall
the shadows of upwardly zigzagging plum branches.

I can see the thinning of branches to the very twig.
I have to sift what you say, what she thinks,

what he believes is genetic strength, what
they agree is inevitable. I have to sift this

quirky and lashing stillness of form to see myself,
even as I see laid out on a table for Death

an assortment of pomegranates and gourds.
And what if Death eats a few pomegranate seeds?

Does it insure a few years of pungent spring?
I see one gourd, yellow from midsection to top

and zucchini-green lower down, but
already the big orange gourd is gnawed black.

I have no idea why the one survives the killing nights.
I have to sift what you said, what I felt,

what you hoped, what I knew. I have to sift 
death as the stark light sifts the branches of the plum.

Mule deer browse in the meadow
                           and meander in clusters down the slope 
                                         across a dry pond bed;

at a shooting range, we stare at a machine 
               loaded with orange-centered circular targets

                                          but are not here to practice firing at ducks;

you climb a metal ladder, sit 
             on a bench high in a ponderosa pine, 

                          and, gazing far, say hunters shoot from here;

we step onto a floating dock, while swallows 
                           scissor the air, loop back, 

                                        fuchsia-streaked clouds undulate on the water;

and when we canoed around a floating island of reeds,
              I understood we came here  
                                          to ignite behind our eyelids—

a yellow-headed blackbird perches on a cattail;
                                         beyond a green metal fence, buffalo graze—

while water runs into this pond, before it spills 
                             over a metal gate into the Río Chamita,

                                                                 we gather our lives in this pooling—

Trudging uphill, I turn onto a deer path
then follow the switchbacks you marked
with orange streamers until I arrive

at a cairn and overlook where I view
the gold run of cottonwoods through the city;
western tanagers migrate through the city.

As I bask in the heat of the afternoon,
I cannot say I had the courage
to march on a bridge for the right

to vote and be beaten; at an antiwar rally,
I retreated when police, mounted on horses,
crossed the street with batons swinging.

As I stride down the switchbacks, I can’t
put into words the radiance of this day;
I stop at a robin’s nest lined with mud

fallen in the grass and scintillate
when at night we step into the yard
and stare up through apple branches at stars.

1

The word acequia is derived from the Arabic as-saqiya (water conduit)and refers to an
irrigation ditch that transports water from a river to farms and fields, as well as the
association of members connected to it.

                                                            Blossoming peach trees—
                                                            to the west, steel buildings glint 
                                                            above the mesa.                                                         

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Acequia del Llano is one and a half miles long and begins
at Nichols Reservoir dam. At the bottom of the dam, an outlet structure and flow meter
control water that runs through a four-inch pipe at up to one hundred-fifty gallons per
minute. The water runs along a hillside and eventually drops into the Santa Fe River.
Fifteen families and two organizations belong to this ditch association, and the acequia
irrigates about thirty acres of gardens and orchards.

                                                            In the ditch, water flowing—
                                                            now an eagle-feather wind.

2

Yarrow, rabbitbrush, claret cup cactus, one-seed juniper, Douglas fir, and scarlet
penstemon are some of the plants in this environment. Endangered and threatened species
include the southwestern willow flycatcher, the least tern, the violet-crowned
hummingbird, the American marten, and the white-tailed ptarmigan. 

                                                            Turning my flashlight 
                                                            behind me, I see a large 
                                                            buck, three feet away.

Each April, all of the members come, or hire workers who come, to do the annual spring
cleaning; this involves walking the length of the ditch, using shovels and clippers to clear
branches, silt, and other debris.

                                                            Twigs, pine needles, plastic bags
                                                            cleared today before moonrise—                  

3

The ditch association is organized with a mayordomo, ditch manager, who oversees the
distribution of water according to each parciante’s (holder of water rights) allotment. The
acequia runs at a higher elevation than all of the land held by the parciantes, so the flow of
water is gravity fed. 

                                                            Crisscrossing the ditch,
                                                            avoiding cholla,
                                                            I snag my hair on branches.

Each year the irrigation season runs from about April 15 to October 15. On Thursdays
and Sundays, at 5:30 a.m., I get up and walk about a quarter of a mile uphill to the ditch
and drop a metal gate into it. When the water level rises, water goes through screens 
then down two pipes and runs below to irrigate grass, lilacs, trees, and an orchard. 

                                                            Across the valley, ten lights
                                                             glimmer from hillside houses.

4

Orion and other constellations of stars stand out at that hour. As it moves toward summer,
the constellations shift, and, by July 1, when I walk uphill, I walk in early daylight. By
mid-September, I again go uphill in the dark and listen for coyote and deer in between the
piñons and junipers. 

                                                            One by one, we light
                                                            candles on leaves, let them go
                                                            flickering downstream.

The Ganges River is 1,569 miles long. The Rio Grande is l,896 miles long; it periodically
dries up, but when it runs its full length, it runs from its headwaters in the mountains of
southern Colorado into the Gulf of Mexico. Water from the Santa Fe River runs into the
Rio Grande. Water from the Acequia del Llano runs into the Santa Fe River. From a
length of one hundred paces along the acequia, I draw our allotment of water.

                                                            Here, I pull a translucent 
                                                            cactus spine out of your hand.

I’m walking in sight of the Río Nambe—

salt cedar rises through silt in an irrigation ditch—

the snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos has already dwindled before spring—

at least no fires erupt in the conifers above Los Alamos—

the plutonium waste has been hauled to an underground site—

a man who built plutonium-triggers breeds horses now—

no one could anticipate this distance from Monticello—

Jefferson despised newspapers, but no one thing takes us out of ourselves—

during the Cultural Revolution, a boy saw his mother shot in front of a firing squad—

a woman detonates when a spam text triggers bombs strapped to her body—

when I come to an upright circular steel lid, I step out of the ditch—

I step out of the ditch but step deeper into myself—

I arrive at a space that no longer needs autumn or spring—

I find ginseng where there is no ginseng my talisman of desire—

though you are visiting Paris, you are here at my fingertips—

though I step back into the ditch, no whitening cloud dispels this world’s mystery—

the ditch ran before the year of the Louisiana Purchase—

I’m walking on silt, glimpsing horses in the field—

fielding the shapes of our bodies in white sand—

though parallel lines touch in the infinite, the infinite is here—

A black-chinned hummingbird lands 

on a metal wire and rests for five seconds; 

for five seconds, a pianist lowers his head 

and rests his hands on the keys; 

a man bathes where irrigation water 

forms a pool before it drains into the river;

a mechanic untwists a plug, and engine oil 

drains into a bucket; for five seconds, 

I smell peppermint through an open window,

recall where a wild leaf grazed your skin;

here touch comes before sight; holding you, 

I recall, across a canal, the sounds of men 

laying cuttlefish on ice at first light;

before first light, physical contact, 

our hearts beating, patter of female rain 

on the roof; as the hummingbird 

whirrs out of sight, the gears of a clock 

mesh at varying speeds; we hear 

a series of ostinato notes and are not tied

to our bodies’ weight on earth.