In Spring when lavender thistles with downy heads bob naively in the phenomenon of newborn hills, I met a bobcat.
I watched him find me and stop.
He lowered himself and widened to command the path, hardened his eye, hardened his fur, toughened even the tufts on the points of his ears.
There is a way he looks when I am not present— and likewise the field might soften beyond beauty and suggestion, more wild than I am permitted to see.
And likewise a man I know might be an even wilder beauty hidden from my territorial gaze.
MIDNIGHT, SAHARA
It's dark tonight like a black beetle crossing the road. I picked it up out of curiosity years ago as children do, and then was picked up myself, interrupted mid-journey, examined, I suppose.
For years now, I've tried to drop down, tried to inhabit the pores of some serpentine cliff, break through the surface of some lake merge with the soul of some fish
and the fish is at it, too: look how it hangs silver in the sky, trying to leap through the scrim.
It's a shame the body can never enter— one feels inexperienced somehow.
But one night, in Earth's thousand mile filne grained sea, in sand so pale it seemed a dream, I thought of auburn hair laid upon a breast.
Fires scorched the shadowed arcs, Bedouin song followed close beside my ear, and laughter ran across the dunes, a solitary animal, unconcerned with me.
What I thought was the least penetrable most difficult to love, opened herself to me— How like a woman in her prime. She has shelved her light to see by heaven.
IN THE WOMEN'S HAMMAM, KERUOUAN
I hoped to be a common miracle to women who rubbed their hands up my thighs,
slapped the sponge against my buttocks and steered to a grey and watery shore where fog loomed by white tiles,
coral limbs swam undersea and brown arms poured the clear contents of a pail.
One woman lifted my hooves, scraped down my shanks, lathered my neck and mane, threw on a towel—
If I am not animal then well-worn rug or loaf of bread.
LOVE POEM
It's like visiting death, they say, and to return from that journey requires focus on the road ahead—
But let’s go out there, tender one and root around in some obliterating and buoyant night until we are ragged and bone worn and desert-walked—
Where darkness rolls its warm breath and bones dissolve to questions; our original structure suddenly, achingly, recalled.
CATBURGLER
Thirty years later my parents still sleep with their door ajar listening for trouble and well they should as I walk the hallways of their strange memorabilia. I slip a first edition of Emerson's essay into my pocket, and memorize a sculpture of St. Sebastian poked ferociously with number #10 galvanized nails hung on the fence, and also the butterfly collection Anne and I framed in glass forty years ago, chloroform in a jar, pins on white cotton, forty years, forty.
As my father dies without complaint, I also steal that hour: an admiration I plan to carry.
At night in my childhood home things gravitate towards me like a natural history of fields with grasses high as our elbows, or those final days of butterflies whose beauty girls would have; or tyrants in this well-known hall, errors in pitch on that violin, or my sisters laughing in procession up the hardpan hill, like a random handbell choir
PEACE COMES DROPPING SLOW
My father who is eighty, my sister, and I trimmed lavender at Green Gulch farm, where the gardener said cut it into clouds, cut savagely, be ruthless.
We spent the morning snipping in the bee loud glen, and then hiked to the cove, repeating like a song the gardener's words, and then we slept on the sand like driftwood masts, my father's mouth wide open.
He had cut himself in the garden beside those pruned trees and staunching the blood, he told us, for no reason, or because he knew he would die that month the shape of time is different than I thought.
Beside the surf, our backs on the sand, we lay quietly and watched a cloud of starlings, flew with them, a fine quicksilver shift to shape.
Above our heads, form —or whatever one calls that fickle gathering of parts—sucked in its hollow cheeks, ballooned to a question mark, condensed to a comma, opened out again to funnel, to whirlwind.
