continental divide

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road

its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss?

—this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle

and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white

past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would

—poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves

I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions:

the smell of a bare neck in summer

a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs

the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill

in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields

the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty

if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them

anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract

the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks

—that was all

and yes, someone took me in his car. and another against the low fence

in the park at the end of our block. under the willow branches

where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away

I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains

the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing

the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night

granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted

and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart

for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing:

a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink

a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass

we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs

the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing

and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing

you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink

half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green

you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us.

you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song

—for Haines Eason

Source: Chronic (Graywolf Press, 2009)