In me a pack of wolves appeared and disappeared

over the hill of my heart.

I, too, follow toward where I am forever returning—

Her.

And somewhere in the dark

of a remote night-vision camera,

the quivering green music of animals.

Ink-Light

We move within the snow-chromed world: Like-animal. Like-deer. An alphabet. Along a street white as lamplight into the winter, walking—: like language, a new text. I touch her with the eyes of my skin.

The way I read any beloved—: from the ramus of the left jaw down to the cuneiform of the right foot. She isn’t so much what she is—: and becomes herself only when added to the space where she isn’t. What is touch—: not the touch not the hand but the white heat it floats through.

I count her my desires, mark her—: hoofprints across the frozen page. Four strokes of dusk. Carbon black, Lamp black, Bone black, Hide glue—: I am the alchemist of ink. She answers me, Quicksilver,

and the noise of her boots upon the snow is the weight of a night bird bending the meteor-blue branch fruiting white flames of cotton. Each of her steps, an allograph—: bird, flexed limb, perfect line of vertebrae, the glyph of my pelvis.

When I put my teeth to her wrist, the world goes everywhere white. Not sound but the dizzying nautilus of what is both the palm and the ear. I invented her hand in this texture—: a grapheme.

In me, a feeling—: white blossom with a red-sided icosahedron inside the velveteen car of a gold train vibrating the violet tunnel of my throat on its way to a dimmed station in my chest—: twenty seats of desire, and I am sitting in each one.

I burn on the silver sparks of her breath moving out of her body. The miracle. No. The power and the glory glory glory of her—: she breathes. Out—: Out—: twenty red seats of desire, I break every one. A series of waves against hammer anvil stirrup—: a vibration of light I can hold with my mouth.

The Mustangs

In another life, my older brother was a beautiful, muscular boy who could jump from a standing position to grab a missed shot right from the rim and either hit a waiting outlet on a fast break or spring back up and drop it through the net for an easy two points. He had thin ankles, long lean legs with high calf muscles balled tight like fists and split like upside-down hearts—runner’s legs, jumper’s legs, Indian legs. He also had the upper body of a Mojave man—wide-chested, broad-shouldered, arms and hands that hung down near his knees, like slingshots is what my mother says, meaning, he is a fighter.

He played varsity basketball for our small town high school, the Needles Mustangs. They wore royal blue and white. A bright blue mustang was painted on the front of the gymnasium, another inside against the brick wall, and a third in a circle on the wooden middle half-court. Mustangs. I associate them with basketball. I have felt them in me—hooves rumbling like weather in my ears and sternum, jolts of muscle like bolts in my throat—the way my brother must have felt those herds stampeding his veins in those years, and done his best to break them.