I.
Inside the cool tomb, we were an ocean
away from home. Thousands
of years ago, the paint was fresh:
Isis arched her broad sky over us,
her skin a scaly stretch of blue-
green, her belly
sprayed with stars.
Even the wind wanted
to brush against
her impossibility, to be
inside her tomb. I unzipped
your pants, and you thought of being
swallowed
by everything bigger
than you. Tombs and skies,
the air itself.
In the valley where I was a child,
winter is over,
and the sky is breaking
open again.
There is no sorcery.
Just the hushing sweep of rain
pounding grass across the valley.
II.
For now, I am a young girl
out walking
across one of the plains states.
Maybe next year you’ll believe me,
before everything freezes.
It will rain one more time, the thunder
like a motor that is starting
and starting, the ignition that is always
about to fire.
I could stop trying to leave here.
I could give myself to this constellation
of farmlights, to this inner rush
of valley wind where snowmelt
refreezes into a vast, shining face.
Sometimes, living here, I find a plain
of fog, somewhere barren
and gorgeous
inside my mind: on a night
when I am nothing, nothing.
III.
Tonight, moving inside me, your hands caught
in my hair, you say, You’re looking through me.
But it is only your face
in my hands that takes me to the field
where I shine and shine
wide open.