I think I understand today how she could come to love it best,

the unraveling, Penelope, every night,

the hills and cypress trees turning back

into thread, then patience again, then . . .

is it emptiness?

All the work of the eyes and breath and fingertips that forced the three dimensions down

into each other going now, all of an instant, back

to what other

place?

Because we were lost, taking our time, today,

taking the long way back

from looking for the Indian petroglyphs we knew were there

but couldn’t find, alone in the miles, the wind

kissing the rocks

to translate them down.

You walked ahead, navigating, lost one, carrying

Emily, all cargo now that I

am emptied finally

of all by my own

undoing

like the sun rising over these gigantic rock formations

coming to touch, in time, every millimeter

of every declivity, rounding, pronouncing them

into the emptiness.

So that I don’t know if the cry was one I heard or

realized, clinging to the windy unsaid as it did,

hovering in, and diving madly from, the possible, the poverty,

wild, high-pitched, mewing and hissing and

knifing down

from two young eagles

into the heart.

They dove they rose,

as helpless on the draft as in control.

Was it the sky’s? Was it my listening silting in?

It was the cry where play and kill are one.

It made me hear how clean the sky around them was of

anything I might have trapped it with.

So when I heard her crying up ahead,

pulling me in,

I heard her cry not add itself

to this enclosure of an emptiness

growing more empty as the minutes flick. I heard

how it stood for strength and was not of that strength.

Unlike that screech, that ancient breath

without a shape above me it

was desire.

I could hear how she and her cry went separate ways,

one to be lost one to be wholly

found out, word for word, taking the place of the sky, a violent usefulness… .

Because there is a moment which is the mother. It flicks

open, alive,

here and here though here she’s

clothed she’s

already gone, only siren, kingdom without extension,

secret sexual place of

placelessness.

Her body opens, burns,

at the edge of each rock each cliff

where the dust is pulling free,

wild in the air again

momentarily,

all arms, the light touching round each mote again grain again, alive, more than

alive… .

Then the beautiful, the view all round us, with that crimp of use in it,

then the husband minutes bearing down, bearing down.