Driving to Santa Fe

Quick swim up 

through the headlights: gold eye

a startle in black: green swift glance 

raking mine. A full second

we held each other, gone. 

Gone. And how did I know

what to call it? Lynx, the only possible 

reply though I’d never seen one. The car 

filling with it: moonlight, 

piñon: a cat’s acrid smell

of terror. How quickly the gray body 

fled, swerving to avoid 

my light. And how often 

that sight returns to me, shames me 

to know how much more this fragment 

matters. More than the broad back 

of a man I loved. More than the image

of my friend, cancer-struck, curled 

by her toilet. More than my regret 

for the child I did not have which I thought 

once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing

beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs 

stirring the dark. And if I keep 

these scraps of it, what did it keep of me? 

A flight, a thunder. A shield of light 

dropped before the eyes, pinned 

inside that magnificent skull only time

would release. Split back, fade

and reveal. Wind 

would open him. Sun would turn him

commonplace: a knot of flies, a ribcage

of shredded tendon, wasp-nest

fragile. The treasure of him, like anything, 

gone. Even now, I thumb that face

like a coin I cannot spend. If something in me 

ever lived, it lived in him, fishing the cold

trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying

when he died, which is a comfort. 

I must say this. Otherwise, I myself 

do not exist. It looked at me 

a moment. A flash of green, of gold

and white. Then the dark came down again

between us. Once, I was afraid

of being changed. Now that is finished. 

The lynx has me in its eye. 

I am already diminished.