I lie in the palm of its hand. I wake in the quiet
separate from the air that’s moving the trees outside.
I walk on its path, fall asleep in it’s darkness.
Loud sounds produce this silence. One of the markers
of the unknown, a thing in itself. To say
When I was in love gives birth to something else.
I walk on it’s path. the food I put in my mouth.
The girl I was riding her horse is not a memory
of desire. It is the place where the unknown
was hovering. The shadow in the cleavage
where two mountains met. The dark trees
and the shade and moving shadows there
where the top of the mountain stops and meets
the light much bigger than it is.
Its weight against all the light. A birthplace
of the unknown, the quick, the invisible.
I would get off my horse and lie down there,
let the wind from the ocean blow the high grass over
my body, be hidden with it, be one of its secrets.
~from All of It Singing (Graywolf Press, 2008)
