I travel to bathe in healing waters

On a train between Colorado and Utah, 2024

Double crescents across my heart
The moving-pain, tearing-brightness.
Insides bruised. Gentle, ripened in transit
Easily mistaken for steel. Salt-bitten, teeth marks
and saliva stains the mountains bleeding. 
Runoff of chrome and acid clear
Endured but stinging. That brightness again 
and a shuddering, on ancient track. 
Each jostle: a granule of ancestral blood
Remembering red-tailed sunset. 
Stars sung into place over each stone monument,
layer upon layer uncovered–like casting wax, carved 
by tectonic knife, 
which has pierced the oily stomach. The great stink 
of sealed-up systems is leveraged and cordoned off. 
Pitched neatly: it’s good for bathing in. 
Mineral miasma renders us decent. 

Beautiful, ungraceful bodies doing what humans do–
remembering the primordial seas. Ships pass in the steam. 

Melodic call from deck in dolphin cadence! 
A narrow range, but the signal is clear
and I pick it up on the spokes of a
Catherine wheel of desire, impaling my
beautiful ungraceful body. Please! do not illuminate
me any more than necessary.

I dream the limerence of small town lights
underneath desert’s goliath night:
Hadal distance, in our headlights’ 
transient, bioluminescent eye.

Blue-eyed Nebraska

On US-18 near Swett, South Dakota, October 2022

Bronze-dust byways arc
the breast of the earth,
which sweats in a golden October rain. The sun tries to upstage.

Grid fields undulate and fly 
underneath her. The humming superengine throbs.
The horsemuscle twitch of her v6 paints a thready line from Illinois,
and I must wonder for how long the land has looked like this. 
In my camera lens, in my rearview. In my sunglass frames. 
Pulling over in a scratched dustcloud, I tie up my horse.
I lay upon the road. 

I set my head down carefully, precisely, in the middle of the tiny gap between yellow lines. Gravel
digs into my scalp beneath my cobweb hair, quilt-square skin.
What's mended will always give, under direct pressure. The blue bowl is placed
over my eyes. 
I close them to better hear the field congregation’s
wordless, breathless, tidal shush. Wind's feathers brush the bridge of my nose. 
The wavering sun does not know whether to charge or retreat–I listen, strain my ears,
but there is no 
trumpet to command her legions forth. 

I can lay here for hours without seeing another. Briefly entertaining the dream of
broken-bottle pour of blood,
grey brain,
my crushed blue eye
ground unrecognizable into the asphalt. If my body became particles
shaken across the earth, would this place so far from the sea recognize me? 
Even vultures would cough up the taste of Atlantic brine.

The road-carried roar of other riders shakes these thoughts out of me.
They settle like so many raindrops, beading perfectly intact upon the ground,
trembling, jellylike;
one million blue-irised eyes. I collect my head. 
Push myself from the ground. Swing a leg over and 
I’ll never ride this road again.

Judas in a painting by Wyeth

Connecticut, 2015

Judas lies immortalized
reaching for home over a dead field–
undeserving even of suffering, for
what was there left to do but forgive? and
allow for reflection. possibly repension–

The supernova heat of heaven’s doors is poorly matched by Yehuda’s small wood stove.
He sits alone mostly; unsurety now lives in his hands.

Gavri’el visits every so often.
Gavri’el smells always of milk and honey and iron, the sweetness of a storm.
The fell consonants of Yehuda’s name
ring through his head when it speaks,
disturbing the dead grass.

Shimon (Peter, they now call him; Yehuda dislikes the sharpness of it)
visits too.
Yehuda wonders why, and does not know whether it is out of sympathy
perhaps nostalgia?
or by way of the bitter road of guilt.
They
sit on the edge of a black ocean
and gaze out at the portal of heaven far above as their tiny, mortal words drift
across the star-freckled waves. They speak of mundane things.
So it would seem.
So it would seem.

Yehuda finds a reflection of himself shimmering and frozen
in Shimon’s gentle eyes. Like fish scales
their memories drift through patches of silence, sunlight.