THE ROCK ART AT CEDAR MESA

Last night I watched a blood moon lift
over the mesa pines
then slept on red dirt near
the spring

You turned across
me in dream
loose brush of
rust brown curls over my chest

just north the Bears Ears buttes
juniper pitch gleaming in moon glare
we clattered down
pour-off gulches into
a world of mud-brick ruins,
handprints, spirals, 
half-human figures, 
masks on rock

Long yellow cliffside waves 
lift, swell, hesitate, lift again
through strata of Navajo sandstone
much like the rhythm you danced
to an old record
you quicker though, more animal like

Now you turn under this huge splash of stars
which rotate cold & blue by the Pole Star
& tug at your jeans
teeth green with embedded
turquoise

from desert herbs, you say 
taken for healing.
your body arches towards my mouth 
raw and trembling.
Six years have gone by, 
dust devils on a land of bare rock

and I can’t tell,
did you return for one
last kiss
or is this
just a sequence of images, a rock art panel
of the mind.

24 May 2021

DARKSOME

The critic Dandin
faltered
he declared Sarasvati white, goddess of 
verse-craft

incontestably white

he did not know me
Vidyā

dark flower at dusk
petals
of indigo


Vidyā, from Sūkti-muktāvalī

*

Darksome, tenebrous, smoked, obscure
the gloam-time, sable-vested, fumid 
hour of the witch
the gathering of storms
she wrote poems good as anyone’s
becloud, bedim, mirksome, engloom
when the moon’s dark
caliginous, somber
it’s a blind man’s holiday
eclipsed
embalmed 


Night & old Chaos 
ancestors to Nature


Empress of silence
Queen of sleep

GRAVEL, CHEESEBOX, HIDEOUT

Two friends study the deep
history of the Southwest,
one makes inquiries from words

the other of dug-up local clay:
pots, bowls, & cups 
terms like off-gassing, micaceous
both find human beauties in
mute rock

Why’s the flute player piping on his back?
what’s the antler creature high up a cliff?
in the open kiln, branch
of juniper hiss

“speak it back hiss
to the ground”

speaking the evil at Chaco Canyon back, that is—
the Old Ones their demagogues
slaves or someone duped by myth
built the giant pueblo complex?

Today I write poems
Prose is too hard in this heat, the vessel
goes brittle, it splinters,

the news outlets say 
130 degrees Death Valley this day.
Do not try to master the secret 
techniques
of power over others

O Spirit you’ve got
further tasks—
canyons, the green mask, the yucca fiber brush

night, sleep, companions,

the stars

THE PATH

First it was Śiva
who fired belief,
crescent moon’s horn in his hair
Next Buddha 
captured your heart
chasing the lamp of insight
What conquered you then?
you walked the narrow path of love with me.
But you cast each trust away.
It hurt me,
I was childlike, unguarded.
Now I send curses—
I curse that masculine strength
curse how you swell up,
fuck the wood longbow
fuck arrows—
ashes I cast on your pride.


Vidyā, from the Saduktikarṇāmṛta


*


Love, Plato tells us
travels between worlds
opens a track from falsehearted human 
to wordless divine
Divinatory plants, science
of what’s holy, 
these come through love’s power—
oracle stones.
Who can see the far circuit?
breach the darkness 
only spoor and tracks hard to follow.
Please treat those you meet 
on the road kindly.

FOR A SCOTTISH MINIMALIST AT THE ANTONINE WALL

This unmortared rock wall seals
a Roman battalion off from the shaggy
tribal people north
a fur & feather-clad people 
a leather and flint arrow people
listen to the rough throaty gibberish of their songs
their war-paint scares the boyish 
conscripts
far from their homeland
far from Rome & the vineyards 
from wine which gives you a moment of courage
the girls with mouthsize breasts
thighs smelling of almond oil
Today tiny poems get swapped
coins of friendship
at a place iron arrows bristled under the blue
fog, moon, & stench of fear

It seems impossible that a poem
can withstand lithium, cobalt
plutonium or facebook
new chemicals drip into the sea & soil
Is there a chance poems might slip a gap—?
gap a fence or burrow under the rock
It is told in my country how
Coyote found out the secret of fences—
bob-wire let him through
a tuft of blue fur (you gotta look close) on the razor barb
he barked & it let him through
I like to believe Coyote 
like these funny mangled poems of ours
outlasts petrochemicals & concrete
rises above the cold compounds of nature
that decay & disappear
but no way we live
standing on these old stone ramparts
no way we live long enough
to raise a friendly hand 
to be sure.

MAGDALENA

Magpies have pillaged the crabapple tree
the Harvest Moon’s waning

sun’s gone into Libra.

a love poem won’t hold you
can’t bind you with words.
The slight invisible way your lips mold the
American mythos

driving the coast that night,
our nation not ready for what the moon promises
it plunges behind white clouds.
shirt & jeans
cradling your heart

the same 

fiery points

move the overhead stars
flex the limbs of Monterey cypress
the zodiac sky one great riddle

all falls in place could we decipher its course—
and I think the true Akademy is that sheltering 
Grove of Trees
where you step.

Or could mean what, our love for poetry?
a distracted King Lear,
Bysshe Shelley, all that mad yearning—
medicine flowers stuck in their cuffs
loose hair, blue, yellow, pink

I see them raving out on
Sugar Loaf Hill

the same night you entered 
the dream
& I thought, rank fumiter, smoke of the earth, black tresses
these many nights moon
snag in black branches

there you stand, still.