These are the Days of Awe, and: I Grew Up in the Dust of Many Horses

These are the Days of Awe

The hillside ritual of green is in its final hour.
No one is criticized for caring how they look
or for not caring. Wrongs turn into bread

which we throw into the river or into anything else
moving steadily away. If this is what it takes -
four hundred men walking arm in arm up the side of a mountain,

up and down until the lost hiker is found - how then,
at a roadside stand picking over gourds and Indian corn,
in a house newly disguised by a weight of leaves,

peering into a darkened store window
where dozens of birds sleep, each head pressed
into a boulder of feathers, will we be found?

I Grew Up in the Dust of Many Horses

And with every disappearance something disappeared
in me, though wise men say there is no leaving
anything behind. The dust itself so often
formed the cover - fine clouds like newborn insect swarms,

like river mist hung low on the hips of evening.
We forgot what once had been by the time it lifted
or, more often, we had gone to sleep,
leather saddles still warm beneath us,

jade pebbles cooling our sunburnt lips.
Someone says this is the land of Genghis Khan.
At this, someone laughs out loud.
A mare stamps her feet above my tooled pillow.

She is used to hearing the same men speak
each night around the same green-gray fire of eyes.
Will we see her there in front of us in morning
when it is time to lift the saddles and ride?