Practical Water

To a Desert Poet

3 / Your loved ones gather strength after an illness; they put their heads against the years. They hear the molecular rattle of the mesquite, the finding bin of syllables, their mothers’ unchanging breath. They ask what is possible, given the wretched governments of earth. A poem can’t do much but it gives o‡ sparks from its wheels, the bristle & the clicks, mostly at moments of resistance. 4 / —& when you went out in the world after the long disease of yourself & saw the colors of the world right before they arrive, the dulls & browns of the absolute season, mauves streaming in the waters of a year, you knew the features of the world are the same as the language of the soul & by traveling in those elements you’d lose your fear— 1 / You traveled, your mind set forward slightly like your father’s watch. You went toward the blurred edges to make a skin of now, of later. The place of origins included dust that spoke, the particle spirits, a hawk with its droplet of blood, an armored toad. Ancestors looked on. You etched letters with a stick, making matter of the beautiful & the felt. 2 / (a divination) The first symmetry was lawless. You had to invent water, to pull meaning from form— a darkness between rhythms— & always at the edge of noon in pale pavilions & ramadas of straw, your practice coded in shadow, the sweet promise of a visitor’s well. Remember the dream of a little owl? It came willingly to your hands, & everything quivered around where it flew in— T O A D E S E R T P O E T ...