Buffalograss
Barely-morning pink curtains
drape an open window. Roaches scatter,
the letter t vibrating in cottonwoods.
His hair horsetail and snakeweed.
I siphon doubt from his throat
for the buffalograss.
Seep willow antler press against
the memory of the first man I saw naked.
His tongue a mosquito whispering
its name a hymn on mesquite,
my cheek. The things we see the other do
collapse words into yucca bone.
The Navajo word for eye
hardens into the word for war.
Copyright © 2019 by Jake Skeets. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem began as a conversation between the Navajo words anáá' and anaa'. Anáá' can be translated to ‘eye’ and anaa' can be translated into ‘war.’ The act of desire can become violent, especially between Native men. I imagined a man seeing another man naked in front of him for the first time; these men become engaged in wants of the eye, desires of the body, but also in an act of war. The couplet, a form that wants harmony between two lines, seemed to be the most perfect fit to speak toward this tension, this desire, this war.”
—Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets’s debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed, 2019), was selected by Kathy Fagan for the 2018 National Poetry Series.