white-throat sparrows/full of note/netted in the eventide/voices
sawing the trees/fragile little bodies/tracing frantic circles
             not understanding/what we must all come to accept/not one day
                         will last/we must end ourselves/as gently as we can
             take our swords/our facts/oddments of feather
                         turn them into the dark/she takes us as we are
             windswept/awake with shattering & nothing
             is as loud as her arms pulling us
             close/not even these wings
             landing/forever
             in the nests of
             my ears

A man can’t die where there is no earth
 
because there will be no place
to bury him. His body is the sky
and understands the language of birds.
 
His body says the earth is made of everything
that has fallen from Heaven
 
while no one was looking. He promises
to defy gravity and then return home.
 
A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel
he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds
talk about the awesomeness of flight
 
while the oxen labor in the fields,
while the cows eat grass and dream
 
of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight
because one day, there will be no sky,
just the body covered in earth.
 
And now the sky is empty of birds.
And now the earth is covered in flowers.

        —for a sixty-seven-pound nugget of Lake Superior copper 
        found in an Iowa cornfield
 
Before the earliest flute
was carved from a vulture’s wing,
 
before we—what few we were—
bowed to the moon,
 
the balmy, secular night,
you were coming.
 
Snug in the great throat of a glacier.
Still as a wish, until its sighing end.
 
I like to think you waited years
for us, one shoulder greening in the damp,
 
the other burnished by long leaves
of wheat, before we called it wheat.
 
Or was it loess, the wind’s fine veil,
polished you so bright we would know you at first sight?
 
What have you seen in the ice and the earth?
Is hell cold, or hot?
 
Do you pray, too? And to what god? 
Or whale, or bigger rock?

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take

       anything it could wet—in a wild rush—

                                 all the way to Mexico.

Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand four-hundred and fifty miles,

pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers

      in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster —

      ‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

                                Colorado pikeminnow—

Up there they glide, gilled with stars.
You see them now—

      god-large, gold-green sides,

                                moon-white belly and breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called

      ‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

                                our words for Milky Way.

Coyote too is up there, crouched in the moon,
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet

      and empty, slung over his back—

                                a prisoner blue and dreaming

of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth

      as it gives itself away to the universe

                                of a sweet-milk body.

Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand light year roads

      of your throat and thighs.