Just after the high school 

the whole thing opens up. 

 

You don’t know it’s coming but there 

it is: desert bowl once a black ocean

 

floor, now bare, the grayedgreyed agave’s

smoky flesh in sediments. I came to eke out

 

some ritual, touch the hidden miracle

to my breast. But meditation left me

 

as a stalk in the red rock: tall and alone, 

wind through me and the song of wind

 

cooing, too soft to decipher. Night stars

bore outward but never into me, their white eyes

 

rolled back in trance, reverent to the Other God,

Other World. Me, so material, so crude 

 

and human. Wolves in every direction but a magnet 

repulsion forced them from me when I called

 

and when I sought the potion in paws of bobcats 

or mythic mammals at the canyon, 

 

their figures faded from the caves’ wet cheeks, 

never jumped from the walls to initiate me, never poured

 

their secret recipe into my palms though I cupped 

them at the riverbed, left my flesh—

 

faithful sliver—browning in the stone home, 

swore to be pure to the amber light 

 

of sycamores while the king snake 

heaved and the crow dove overhead 

 

in wide circles but didn’t land. 

Dusk drowned in a lavender milk 

 

beyond the airport, so quiet, its secret 

gone in minutes as I stood 

 

on the roadside, empty-palmed 

in a long night.