The Brooklyn Rail

Santa Fe

In the dream I said something
         and it made a difference
and the world fluttered up like a little bird
out of the bush and into another

The sky turned yellow at the tip-top edges of the bowl
         we were staying in
and black beyond that—
And there we were under the night sky
in the quiet scrubby yard

Mountain Lion

         1)

How she’d get lost in a
suburb full of yarrow and sage where
the flowers escape us and spread
like noise in the alleyways
from the neighbors’ hard living,
a big box of honeybees,
before the summer got too hot
an alleycat bristled and ran
is how they knew it—

         2)

If you could pull information from the air: something is off or exciting,
and if you could make it ring like something elemental, like once a dark
wood a child a girl a swan a lion in a clearing a crowd in a town square
trying to see the beautiful doomed witch or woman saint who’s not dis-
membered yet because who wouldn’t, something has happened,
wrong right or exciting like once on the Rue Oberkampf the grocer
murdered his assistant and everyone looked the same way down the
street, the hair on the back of your neck, a girl in the bar with a smooth
face—

         3)

What could I have her say?
She wanted to be wild in it, everywhere,
This is about her, not me!
A mountain lion
in a town is distant & improbable.
She stalked down, following
Little Dry Creek.
Early summer was so green she couldn’t help it.
She wanted to be wild in it, everywhere.
A young one, a beauty—

         4)

Under your deck it is chill and quiet.
The lights in the city brightened so down I went.

Green: you did something to make it this way.

I’m not here to make you more alive
But I do, just by being here