Our grandmother in her seventies,

bent to the thistle, tugging,

the sun hammering the desert

into its final making—

and her, still prosecuting weeds.

The Reason . . .

It sits in our silence.

A hum so low in my pocket,

A note uncaptured in the air.

But I keep returning to one

who hides her whole year

as a dead thing —

thin stems, grey as death,

unread against the creosote

until the night opens her

like a secret kept so long

it became her sex’s secret.

There is a bird that keeps its song

past the falling day —

not because of its courage

but because it has forgotten

what the silence means.

Come and take what's left.

I am now awaiting you.

I have been practicing this

my whole life.

The earth dances.

I know this.

I watch it from the edge

where I keep going back

to see if this time

the thing in the wind

is something other than

the thing in the wind.

VI.

There are creatures —

I can scarcely hold the full weight of it —

who hate the very vessel

that cracked open

and gave them their first breath,

who take the compass of compassion

a woman pressed into their chest

and use it to find their way

back to her throat.

Perhaps you are already here —

wearing a white man’s clothing,

your eyes no longer black

but blue from a ransomed country.

As I am poured

into a white woman’s skin,

my eyes gone green

with the translation.

And I will sit beside the open window

while dawn unbuttons all its dreadful light,

feeling my life drip slowly through the hour

like rainwater escaping through a crack.