the sleeping place

[knees pressed into the sandy soil of this fragrant field,
a drop of human musk in the expanse
of clover mustard & winter wheat.]

This tiny world/
(eight outdoor cats and a fraying, desiccated mouse skeleton on the front steps)
is linked to billions of other crystalline places/
(a devoured spider's skeleton still hanging from a blade
of grass, spinarets left miraculously intact and hollowed body open
to reveal eight tunnels to tiny legs)

is linked by the sinewy black wires of telephone poles.

Hopi gods mapped geometric and towering across the blue &
white(gold) back of the palomino sky, the spectral ghosts of the power lines
cradle the buckskin world in their outstretched limbs--

they are the wardens of this abandoned country,and their fierceness preserves
the wildly inhabited empty spaces where Nature steals
in like water downhill
and is sucked up by the life that uncurls here,
rosy-cheeked and vibrating/

(red ants crawling
up my sleeping legs)

exalting in the berth we give to our creations
and the taboo of change.


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