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EARTHSHINE
1

“Fuck you, fuck you,” he repeated as he drove down the dirt road
while tamarisk branches scraped the side of the pickup;

what scrapes in the mind as it dilates to darkness?

“Jodido,” he winced and turned up the whites of his eyes;

“What comes from darkness, I strike with darkness”;

who hears a night-blooming cereus
unfold a white blossom by the windowsill?

crackle of flames in the fireplace;

lapping of waves against rocks
as a manta ray flips and feeds on plankton;

the gasp when he glanced down at the obituaries;

the gasp when she unwrapped flecked rice paper to find a letterpress broadside;

spurt of match into gold as he lights white beeswax candles;

she is running her hair between his toes;
he is rubbing her nipples with his palms;

“What comes from brightness, I strike with brightness”;

his ankles creaked as he tiptoed to the bathroom;

waking to a cat chewing on a mouse in the dark.
 


2

Hiking up a trail in the Manoa Valley arboretum,
he motions with his hand to stop as he tries
to distinguish whether a red-whiskered or
red-vented bulbul has just landed on a branch.
I spot a macadamia nut on the ground, glance
up into an adjacent tree and am shocked by
two enormous jackfruit suspended from the trunk.
Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling
a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root,
slap a mosquito on my arm. We go on, but stop
when gnats lift into a cloud as we stumble into
a bunch of rose apples rotting on the ground.
Although we continue to a dead end where water
runs down a sheer rock, the mind stops here:
here Amanita muscarias release a cloud of spores
into cool August air; here lovers make
earthshine on a waxing crescent moon; here
the phone rings and I learn of a suicide,
a pinhole grows into an eclipse; here
water drips as I descend into a sloping black lava tube.


3

Say teeth;
say gnawed his teeth in his sleep;
say each spring he scraped peeling blue paint off the windowsill;
say the ocean flickers;
say a squiggly chalk line screeching down a blackboard opens a black rift;
say on a float house yellow cedar smoke rises in the woodstove;
say burn;
say crumpled white papers ripple then burst into yellow twists of flame;
say parallel lines touch in the infinite;
say peel;
say stoplight screech go green laugh;
say screech, rip, slam, thud, body scrapes, bleeds to bone;
say hyena;
say bobcat stripped of skin;
say a black cricket chirps in a corner of the room;
say hang;
say ox shoulder hangs off hook;
say trimming roses, she slashed her left wrist;
say shit-smear hair-sway leaf-gold ooze;
say crack;
say breaking a wineglass in a white napkin recovers a sliver of original light;
say egg-white eyeball splash;
say rinse;
say bend to earth, find a single stalk budding gold.


4

He hanged himself with his belt in the bosque
is no longer a whip that reddens and flays the skin.
“Donkey piss,” he once cracked—but who
knows how the light sizzled and burned a hole
that gnawed and gnawed so that the more he
twisted the more he convulsed into a black pitch?
Orange daylilies are blooming along the driveway;
long-stalked delphiniums are bending to earth.
A firework explodes in white gold then bursts
into a green shimmer. He leaves teeth marks
on her neck; she groans and shows the whites
of her eyes. When a car rushes by on a wet road,
he hears a laborer throw sand against a tilted screen
and realizes twenty-three years ago he threw
sand against a tilted screen. Now, when he
strokes the tendons of her left wrist, she sighs.
They are now nowhere everywhere none such;
they are not look back time but full moon first light.


5

She said he said “moon” in his sleep;

when he looked through the pot-bellied telescope,
the light of the full moon made him wince;

he had to gaze into darkness
and then saw from Mare Cognitum to Mare Serenitatis;

the mind aches to see at such distance such definition;

when she heard the barking dog,
she shined a flashlight and spotted a porcupine on the roof;

as you would spotlight a deer;

a snake slides under the redwood boardwalk by the kitchen;

he kisses her shoulders,
rubs the soles of her feet;

the mind aligns such slivers;

say dragonfly, quartz, cattail, tuning fork, wave;
say earthstar bursting into alpine air;
say c²

say even the sacred barley drink separates if it is not stirred,
and see how, stirred, one can find repose.

 
6

Sipping mint tea in the ebbing heat of the day,
I recollect how we stumbled onto a raccoon
squashed between boards leaning against a fence,
tadpoles wriggling at the edge of a pond.
On the living room table, thirty-six peonies
in a vase dry and become crepe-paper light
to touch. Yesterday you watered blue chamisa
along the county road, while I watered desert grass
under the willow. I recollect opening a brown,
humid box and, stunned, lifted a handful
of morels, inhaling the black aroma of earth.
What is it we give each other—gold, shark’s fin—
other than a renewed sense of the miraculous?
Nanao watched a blip on the radar screen; later,
when he saw the flash, he thought Mt. Fuji
had erupted in a burst of light. Sipping mint tea
on the longest day of the year, I sense how
the balance of a life sways, and a petal may tip it.


7

A steady evening with a first-quarter moon;
numerous craters along the terminator are razor sharp;

I observe the ghostly bluish glow of earthshine
and feel how the moon has no permanent dark side.

A horse neighs by the barbed wire fence;
we trudge into a wet field, carrying, from under the portal,

a bee’s nest in a basket, place it in a nook
of a silver poplar. Will any bees hatch in spring?

I notice thorns on the bare branches of Russian olives;
you spot coyote scat before the v-shaped gate.

We walk to where the Pojoaque and Nambe flow together—
I am amazed at how we blossom into each other.

I hear the occasional drone of cars on highway 285,
hear how the living expire into smoke

and the dead inflame the minds of the living.
When I exhale against a cold window, I see

the ever-shifting line along the terminator;
and, as the shadow cast by the rim of Theophilus

slips across the crater’s floor, I feel light
surge into a honeycomb gold—it all goes and comes at once.