Driving to Santa Fe

Quick swim up through my headlights: gold eye

a startle in black: green swift glance

raking mine. A full second

we held each other, then gone.

Gone. And how did I know

what to call it? Lynx, the only possible

reply though I’d never seen one. The car

filling with it: moonlight,

piñon: a cat’s acrid smell

of terror. How quickly the gray body

fled, swerving to avoid

my light. And how often

that sight returns to me, shames me

to know how much more this fragment

matters. More than the broad back

of a man I loved. More than the image

of my friend, cancer-struck, curled

by her toilet. More than my regret

for the child I did not have which I thought

once would pierce me, utterly. Nothing

beside that dense muscle, faint gold guard hairs

stirring the dark. And if I keep

these scraps of it, what did it keep of me?

A flight, a thunder. A shield of light

dropped before the eyes, pinned

inside that magnificent skull only time

would release. Split back, fade

and reveal. Wind

would open him. Sun would turn him

commonplace: a knot of flies, a rib cage

of shredded tendon, wasp-nest

fragile. The treasure of him, like anything,

gone. Even now, I thumb that face

like a coin I cannot spend. If I ever lived,

I lived in him, fishing the cold

trout-thick streams, waking to snow, dying

when he died, which is a comfort.

I must say this. Otherwise, I myself

do not exist. It looked at me

a moment. A flash of green, of gold

and white. Then the dark came down

again between us. Once, I was afraid

of being changed. Now that is done.

The lynx has me in its eye.

I am already diminished.