The other foot and incense
The other foot
(for MKM.)
If ever hillocks
bended back, or showed
us different faces,
then we’d be wrong
to call this feeling joy.
This way not that!
Although it’s hidden
being hidden,
although the wild flowers
all have names
that we don’t know,
joyously so.
If ever a flower’s name
did change
and something happened
to it, we must be off
on the other foot.
The pines are social
animals, they crowd
the shadowed heights,
and doves,
their hardened tremolos
easing up as morning
wanes, are just,
promising each other
safe return
from in between the bluffs
and shattered trunks.
The pine, however, knows
no pine, the dove
no dove, as if
these words
could empty, otherwise
refer to others living
on the other face
this hillock hides,
as if we could’ve had
a different joy,
another sorrow,
a view on the whole
from above.
What we thought
was a crest
was a shallowing out
of the same.
--
Incense
(for MKM.)
Luckily, the sagebrush slope was downwind
from the rivulet between the landings, where a bolus
of cold, recirculating air was resting.
It meant that that elk, the one with the anomalously wide
juvenile antlers, couldn’t tell that we were coming over.
In this, of course, we shared in ignorance,
having been until then occupied with finding ready made
mule deer trails through the sage and trading anecdotes
of how we’ve healed since 2020. And then, as we crossed
the tree line, you put out your hand to stop me quiet.
The wind had also quieted, bitter, sappy, gyring,
and already the tips of his antlers were bounding away
around the fold like a pair of doves with long,
connected tails. Drops of guilt for needing the warning
splashed in my heart but subsided, in part
because I’m less afraid of hurting others now,
but also you immediately turned to spot the female,
who took a couple precious seconds more to rouse
and to scatter. I don’t even think I saw her,
and all I felt was the ripple of my iris as I looked
where you looked, rippling which could’ve just as well
been the dance of aspen leaves, or refractions
in the bolus of air on the water, or the swirl
of pain which kicks up when it’s threatened.