Skin blades open the river.
Undressing stones. Your word for goose
skips miniature shadows.
This love story
a horse still drunk from war. Named for the incredible absence of her jaw.
We look up through jasper eyes from the mud.
Dearth is no name for a horse.
Diseased trope harboring a gentle eye.
The banks thicken at low tide. The river
decreasing year within year. Out slowly.
I expose your thigh and want to fill you.
At Nevada the river hooks south.
Hoover, Davis, Parker,
Laguna … I dip my hand
in the bath over your hair.
Bending. I ask you not to shave. Our geography
emerges another form of story.
Only deserts know the slow complete
life of water. We negotiate
the record, wash the body returned.
Tell me again. Your names
for what we become.
Sure and incredible patience of your sacrum
incredible churning of the Colorado at night.
This epic has no hero only flesh. Wealth
of textures fade to sky
low basin flora. Verde. The efficient
grace of a Mojave green. Coyotes
stay their lone nocturnes
mourning from every hole.
Davis Dam holds the river
into Lake Mohave. A transitive
occurrence relocates power up
to two tera-watt-hours per year.
Chronology and where it takes us. Disoriented
beneath velvet canopies of.
Dearth makes empty the valley. Unyielding
irrational beast. She my gift to you, stumbling
animal graft with scars.
Her redding eye. Wandering night
without horizon. Her whipped exterior
whetting the mesas with her sides.
Your mouth opens
for my light-filtered hand.
Questions best handled
as expressions of time.
Razorback suckers can live for four decades. Larva drift
to floodplains where one in five breathes into December.
Subjection designates legal flesh.
Grammars of threat to be threatened; endangered;
endangered by; to be in danger of.
Warm anatomy shouldering
each state
thick-muscled to tend uninhabitable fields.
The river devoted. You between me
rich-veined dermis. Lines of
you I take.
An articulation,
night requiring sweat itself requires hunger.
Determine a form. What it touches
births and makes light. I inside
of we, we fleshing us, and us
dips hot down my throat.
Wanting sleep, I’ve entered the field
of your body. When I’ve wanted to eat
I‘ve opened your mouth and birthed light.
Sun breaks on the river,
a scarlet-eye. Sandhill cranes.
When Dearth, longing, approaches
the wings part into flight.