Sojourn, and: On Airports

Sojourn

If you took a wash of gold into your mouthand spat, out would slip the Big Horn Mountains,their kuriltai of rams, turbid elk shiftsbleared as sieve riffles through the haze off the rapids,and spindrifts kicked up by their paddlinghooves and caught and then shook from their beards.These hit the breeze and whip up to our lipsthat we lick and taste milkweed and bark andmetallics. Your palm takes my waist as we watchthe elk throttle onto the woad blue shore.Fat shoulders of rain are spindling in from the eastlike a herd of wheels. The sun's pannersrespool and withdraw to the western caves.You have no likeness, not in their flanks glassedwith water, not in the hot chest of earth,which shivers its bribes into the river and catchesin the rams' heels and the hares' fur, and purrs theretoward us. Slaughterer of onslaughts, you tent usbeneath a slick wink of canvas and the rain comes.

On Airports

He flew out on days,    he flew back    in thick night.    With my sister I nappedon the airport stairs    under fluorescent lights.    The beige carpets    wore to my shape,like one more stuffed dog.    The pill-windows    trundled paper-bright,    gateward.Again away. I clutched    his hat or    his overcoat. It    rippled down overmy shoes like a    snowdrift. Off to some    where pink    on a map. Or delayedreturn from West    Africa in a westward plane,    upholstered in    beige, seatsspeed-dazed inclined    back. That's how    I dreamed it: that he    was mid-air, smokingcigarettes by the coffeepot    while it refilled.    My first worshipped    fiction. I wantedthis, was happy for him,    couldn't miss    him too hard or    it'd suck him back.On the second step    down a clot of insects,    silverfish, nibbled    neat notches, morsecode in the carpet. Each    time I returned each    had shed eight times,    and in years, darkmounds of moults looked like    hundreds    of friends, hundreds    and hundreds of them.