A river traced, a day traversed.
Do you recall the water’s taste,
or just the act of quenching thirst?
§
Flint has scratched two lines, a lens,
on the stone fluke
of a glacier-borne erratic,
the contour of a silverside
that flashed through evening shallows
with hummingbird intensity;
the contour of a silverside,
or else a constellation
brought down to rest on earth,
chips of starlight rendered
intimate and runic.
§
A solitary solitaire
sings from a pine through desert air
above Cieneguilla,
the bird itself a bowl, a glyph
for liquid pecked into the cliff,
a draft of pure idea.
§
Even shadows submit to scrutiny.
You graph a certain slant of light
across the face of a sandstone bluff
at early dusk in January—
tracery of twigs
and flat determinism of fact—
until one morning these bare lines
suddenly burst into flower.