I step lightly. I am holding my breath, maintaining,

to keep it all from shifting.

Then it happens. Through what was perfect

a carboned rubble sifts up—

tangled rebar, torn fences, scrambled,

sheet metal, oxidized and spiking,

breaking the sand like it’s my own skin.

I feel the junk of it all in my body—a rising wild.

I can’t stop the happening. The rusting is in me,

like how a deep wound heals—glimmered, open.

There is no pattern of four in this dream,

just land and its moving.

The dunes and how they are taken, reorganized

and reckoned, grains loosened, Archimedes’s myriad

myriads, sifting in a coppered stream—

saltation, they call it, from Latin saltare, meaning to jump or leap.

Isn’t that what we do on the page?

John Ashbery died today, and tomorrow is my birthday.

Maybe death is a way to clean the self, of the body,

to finally celebrate it. A celebration should leave a mess.

O, lit pyre of my anxiety,

the ash-silver it streaks heavy across my chest and brow.

The doctor asked, Do you feel a sense of doom?

Instead of replying, I wrote: What do you call a group of worms

if not a worry, if not a wonder?

That was before I knew a dune has a slip face and a slack.

I have read more Ashbery today than I read when he lived—

It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things

definitely aren’t it,

like the red sugar horses and their satellite eyes,

sphering and sick beneath the decks

of your body, their ship.

We know how to speak to our conquerors, don’t we?

What if you whisper into the long ear of one,

say, Beloved Occupier, Beloved Hoof

and Stiff Green Gallop.

Then tell them a story about the horse latitudes—

a place so still not even the wind will go there.

That if they can’t get it together, won’t quit making a mess of you—

those animals—won’t stop carouseling

your blood to hippodrome,

we might take them there, to some vast middle, lead them

over the decks,

and far from the desert give them up to the sea,

watch the slow green-blue dunes lift open

and disrupt everything, which cannot be stilled.

The First Water Is the Body

The Colorado River is the most endangered river in the United States—also, it is a part of my body.

I carry a river. It is who I am: ‘Aha Makav. This is not metaphor.

When a Mojave says, Inyech ‘Aha Makavch ithuum, we are saying our name. We are telling a story of our existence. The river runs through the middle of my body.

So far, I have said the word river in every stanza. I don’t want to waste water. I must preserve the river in my body.

In future stanzas, I will try to be more conservative.

The Spanish called us, Mojave. Colorado, the name they gave our river because it was silt-red-thick.