The girl, he said. O, the girl.

What girl? I asked.

You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.

I watched him drag his wrecked fingers

over the chipped flower-work of the wood—

You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it—

no matter how many books you’ve read.

He was wrong. I could take the ark.

I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.

The way they almost glittered.

It was the animals—the animals I could not take—

they came up the walkway into my house,

cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,

marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,

tails snaking across my feet before disappearing

like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows

of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,

reaching out for him—wildebeests, pigs,

the oryxes with their black matching horns,

javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots

with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.

So many kinds of creature.

I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,

but my brother stopped me—

This is serious, he said.

You have to understand.

It can save you.

So I sat down, with my brother ruined open like that,

and two by two the fantastical beasts

parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,

built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup

before floating it away from the table.

My brother—teeming with shadows—

a hull of bones, lit by tooth and tusk,

lifting his ark high in the air.

How the Milky Way Was Made

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-fast

flood. Able to take

anything it could wet—in a wild rush—

all the way to Mexico.

Now it is shattered by fifteen dams

over one thousand four hundred and fifty miles,

pipes and pumps filling

swimming pools and sprinklers

in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds,

loosed them in our heavens, set them aster—

‘Achii ‘ahan, Mojave salmon,

Colorado pike minnow.

Up there they glide gilled with stars.

You see them now—

god-large, gold-green sides,

lunar-white belly to breast—

making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,

rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.

The blurred wake they drag as they make their path

through the night sky is called

‘Achii ‘ahan nyuunye—

our words for Milky Way.

Coyote too is up there, locked in the moon

after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet

and empty slung over his back—

a prisoner blue and dreaming

of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.

O, the weakness of any mouth

as it gives itself away to the universe

of a sweet-milk body.

As my own mouth is dreamed to thirst

the long desire-ways, the hundred thousand light-year roads

of your wrists and thighs.

exhibits from The American Water Museum

0.

I can’t tell you anything new about the river—

you can’t tell a river to itself.