From two months within the infinite and fleeting green
of Wisconsin summer the mountains and salt flats
call you back into another life of speed and thrill
and thinning air,
but even
here
across flat, yellowing cornfields and scrolling prairie
you make my breath skip:
Our nights,
we have passed
without blinking, with restless eyes and hands and
mouths double-tracing every last curve and scar
sated yet hungry with this moment and for the thousand
that will follow. Somehow, you pull me down
and fasten me to both the desert and the stars
with an alchemy of language, of laughter, and warmth.
Did we guess we’d plummet, so hard and fast, as they say,
into a depth far brighter and more terrifying
than the slope of any blinding precipice?
Can you know,
when you are flying,
falling, how tethered
you still are to gravity?
Of course we will catch each other,
and those who come within our reach,
because whatever it is, it's a contagion, bed fellows
with entropy but working in the opposite direction,
like weeds, like joy, like cancer, like fire’s appetite.
Then, just
now
I imagine the elegant towers and erosions
on the face of the Rockies, and the wild grace
of swirling dust and drunken rabbits,
and wonder if just anyone off the street can notice
how time and space around us bend
as if it is completely ordinary
that
we are a new universe, surging.
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