Leaving Tulsa

Tracing Magdalena

61 Tracing Magdalena 1. In the distance, a forest. I thread your muscular light through the trees, cross-stitch the canal of your throat. Stitching on canvas is a way of stepping over the river to gather material from the other side. Pine. Birchbark. Patterns gnawed into white undersides—traces I carry back across the waves where I hang your blue dress in the breezeway to dry. 2. How fast the twilight shifts across canvas. A stream of white birds ribbons over glass. Standing now in half-light at the boundary of a sea, I draw a line to demonstrate the emptiness. Shades of gray recede to snow—miles yet to travel across the boundless sound. Trucks pass. Roads freeze. And I no longer know the difference between water and air or which I should breathe. 62 When the night arrives, you are still here. It is still winter, the clouds are still advancing over your eyes. There are windows but I pass by, tracing your shadow by hand. 3. Looking out the window to the sand I reach for your breath. Your footprints on the white beach: callas. Facing the snow, the frozen ocean, your back of clouds. 4. I crashed upon your shore. A sea I have no name for. Now even the sunrise cracking open the desert becomes only a dream of you. I go to the crest of a dune. Wait amidst the splintered stars jutting from the dust. I wait past dusk, its spiraled mollusk. My ear is a pebble. I swallow the light. Disappear into the seamless continent of night. 5. There are miles yet to travel through the nether lands. A winding road bordered with poppies. Yellow ochre. Iron oxide. On what does the intensity of color depend? The proximity of my easel to the spilled 63 apple blossoms. But it is winter and my window is the same thought continued: spear-like forms, your ghost suspended. Your voice a sharp wind rising from the still air, a doorway ajar inside the molecule’s bone closet, your face a painting of an ice hut where white fish dart beneath your blue dress of snow and there is no hope to wake you. 6. At land’s end, no witnesses. Not even the trees sketched on the horizon. Not even the night snowing from the vent in my ribs. I dream a pathway to the edge of my canvas. Beyond that— you. ...