Half Life
for Kitsoyabone
When lightning burned a door in your chest, you didn't
follow, though your cattle made
room for your death in the bitten grass.
All night you refused consciousness the way I'd back
out of my life those evenings
pricked to small lights, abandoning the house
on my bicycle, my left arm plaster-bent to approach
less the shape of the skating blade I had failed, another object
bobbled like the ball that lost
its inborn arc at my touch. The winter sky crystallized
to the vein at Owl Canyon, geometric
needles of quartz constellating the sandstone wrist I
chipped one summer to bits. So the bolt
was a revelation you turned first
towards then finally away, graduating
to stamping incoming files at Immigration, drifters you know by the blank
of paper beneath the names. Kitso, even legends remain
tainted by ladders and bandages, someone
to carry you, white hospital cloth, a machine turned to Go.
Gauzy details through which I recognize this silence
you took years to break, that atmospheric force
ghosting your pen. As I returned
to the house with its porch of ruined snow, you turned and walked
back into the wreck you came finally to
recognize as home. Rejecting the white light,
its room of shadows. Writing this letter, the lake of ice
pitted blue, the blade refusing the purity
of silence and grace, the other life turned
a mirror to the wall; the page torn by your pen
echoes the mountain cracked by that emptied vein
surviving to this day, the fossil of absence, what you kept
closeted in the broken staircase of your ribs on turning away.
From Nomadic Foundations. First published in Denver Quarterly.
for Kitsoyabone
When lightning burned a door in your chest, you didn't
follow, though your cattle made
room for your death in the bitten grass.
All night you refused consciousness the way I'd back
out of my life those evenings
pricked to small lights, abandoning the house
on my bicycle, my left arm plaster-bent to approach
less the shape of the skating blade I had failed, another object
bobbled like the ball that lost
its inborn arc at my touch. The winter sky crystallized
to the vein at Owl Canyon, geometric
needles of quartz constellating the sandstone wrist I
chipped one summer to bits. So the bolt
was a revelation you turned first
towards then finally away, graduating
to stamping incoming files at Immigration, drifters you know by the blank
of paper beneath the names. Kitso, even legends remain
tainted by ladders and bandages, someone
to carry you, white hospital cloth, a machine turned to Go.
Gauzy details through which I recognize this silence
you took years to break, that atmospheric force
ghosting your pen. As I returned
to the house with its porch of ruined snow, you turned and walked
back into the wreck you came finally to
recognize as home. Rejecting the white light,
its room of shadows. Writing this letter, the lake of ice
pitted blue, the blade refusing the purity
of silence and grace, the other life turned
a mirror to the wall; the page torn by your pen
echoes the mountain cracked by that emptied vein
surviving to this day, the fossil of absence, what you kept
closeted in the broken staircase of your ribs on turning away.
From Nomadic Foundations. First published in Denver Quarterly.