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When Our Breath Overlaps with Ghosts
Then the wind stopped.
And in its place, the moon rose,
golden, crawling dusk out of the rabbitbrush
and brome. The dead are dead again,
and keep dying, luminous in the cheatgrass,
banked on the saddle northwest
between two pine ridges. Wyoming
is close and far away at once.
As is its frontier past. And its mustangs pummeling
the plains all the way to Carson City
and Reno. My shadow, molded to this mountain,
outside chopping wood. A dazzling dead man has eyes
like a frozen postage stamp. Back in the specialty years
of airmail, we paid more to deliver our breath
across the continent, through the sky.
Now, the wind carries my silence
and its cure. The deer carcass I came upon
last evening on my gravel mountain
road somehow had my name on it, inscribed with salt.
Down the burly black water ridge,
the earth is slipping away. Each day. Each hour
of my life. I had wanted a brief respite from the clay
my body kept trying to convince me was my calling.
And all the sore places. All the soreness
of my mouth kept repeating that I’d never find the word
I needed most. Tongue-stuck and stumped,
I was far away, and I was close.
I grew closer to myself even as I kept slipping away.
This is Colorado. This is now. Behind the moon
are sassafras stumps and teacups
from which I keep sipping,
trying to drain. The wild horses roughing the range
are wilder than the ominous thunderhead
in a piercingly blue sky, the thunderclap
of their hooves telling me
I must go on. Reminding me that the turkey vultures
circling the house earlier this afternoon
fluffed their wingèd bleed, dazzlingly dervish
in their wind dance, ecstatic in their death offerings
as they cut my name into the sky
over and over again. |
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