Spoken Into

This could be Dakota, the entire way
to the night sky. In our little cove
of a dream, the stars—anchored inside
our mouths—keep saying, water, water, wind, and fire.
Where was the earth we’d tried so long?
The ground we thought we’d walked on?
We had lost it some midnights
among the startling days
as the shade grew heavy, holding our names
wobbling but seemingly intact.

My grandmother could bake blackberry pie
to rival the dusk, a darkness whose simple grace
was to lie down at the close of each day, inside
us, to calm us like the beagle-hound had,
head thrust out in front on its paws. The moon
went on being the moon even when
the maples strained red
beneath it. Even when pines cut
woodblocks of Japanese bonsai
deeply into it.

Now, years late, this is Colorado, though it could
just as easily be the Missouri Breaks, Cedar Falls,
or even Claxton Mills. The stars in our mouths
make strange moth movements, fluttering
upon our tongues as if what we speak
is the depth of light we need
to get to. And the trying, hard, to get there.

But the stars, in space, also call forth
the shade—those dark places we finger
tenderly when we think no one is looking.
As if calling the blood. As if calling back
from the bruised walls of caves
where bears den-up for winter, fat
from blackberry brambles and trout.

How to account for each finger
and what it feels? How to calm
the remaining pines carving the moon
into simple, discernible chunks?
Each cut, a slice of what we know
we had once been and what we hope
we can again one day become.
The way we long for primordial wool.
Put on a shirt. Adjust a button.
And lie with the night sky that lays down
its scars into the galaxies we glimpse
of and weep.