Now he’s watching scarves of cloud
slide over the plane’s steel wing.

Surely it’s real, this swirl of light.
But the visions that confront him do not enter his life.

I borrowed my brightness from her. Where is it now?

Memento mori. And just so,
these clouds like lines of coke,
these fine bird-bone clouds
giving structure to the afternoon sky
will decompose into faint nothings.

Down below, that’s not a landfill;
it’s a mirror.

I don’t remember having left the earth. And
yet I must have, for I don’t recognize this
place or myself. It’s as if I entered
a forest filled with warblers, and though I suspect
they’re singing, my ears are bunged with tar.

*

But I was a jukebox. What came out of me was just
what other people wanted to hear.

Let’s let sleeping dogs tell the truth.

I see the lives of others. But not their actual lives.

The more I try to remember it, the more the word fades.

Time metamorphoses memories and buries them. There’s
no restitution. Gradually, they fold in on themselves, irretrievable.

June morning. The mockingbird triggers my impulse
to respond with a standing ovation.
Because I gripped what I loved tightly, what
I’ve lived makes it easier for me to leave it behind
when my time comes.

Because I didn’t grip tightly enough—

My younger sister died today. My
father died today. My closest friend
died today. My mother died today. Each
of their deaths detonates in iterative
simultaneity inside the tissue
of my being, unanchoring me,
setting me adrift.

Such griefs as are graves.

How is it I can continue to smolder like this? Why am I not consumed?

*

Summer roadrunners patrol the mesquite and brown
barrel cacti, snatching grasshoppers out of the air.

As you rub the sunblind from your eyes.

What to say of the pastel
chromaticism of these Mojave sunsets?

Here, as everywhere, when you go still,
what has disappeared comes forward.

Ya me cayó el veinte.

And you, an earthbound sun, a radiance.

When we return to our car parked on the laterite
verge of the road, I distract you from noticing
the dead bird melted into a gruel, its eyes
glazed with clusters of fly eggs.

Only when we reach the edges of experience
do we begin to intuit the more-than-this.

Who will contradict me if I say you were and you are.

We drive deeper into the desert, arguing
about whether it’s possible
to love without reservations.

When we stop for gas in Barstow,
where I was born, a boy offers to let you hold
the horned toad he is gently stroking
in the direction of its spines.