of thirst with your dirty jug?

Are you able to love anyone—

your mother, your son, your lover—

in the midst of such hunger and this fire

stretching out and lengthening your throat?

How many bodies have you pressed into,

not for desire but for the saliva you sucked

from their tongue?

Have you leaned your head against the miles

and miles of cyclone fence to steady the dizziness,

to slow the breath and thud at your temples,

the mirages, and hallucinations?

Have you ever considered your thirst as a weapon?

Do you now consider yourself a soldier

in the battle for something wet?

Do you recall in how many instances

you didn’t care when it was

someone else’s thirst erupting?

And now: Who should fill your cup

from their own jug?

211.

There are differing opinions about how kissing

became criminal. Who hasn’t drunk,

hasn’t begged at the well of a lover’s mouth?

Love has never been different from thirst,

but now everything is different. All the cups

are filled with dirt—even our mouths.

3000.

Water remembers everything it travels over and through.

If you have been in water, part of you remains there still.

It is a memoir of an indissoluble relationship with the world.

But where is water now? Where is the world?

301.

The Magic Show:

Only water can change water, can heal itself. Not even God

made water. Not on any of the seven days. It was already here.

Or maybe God is water, because I am water, and you are water.

11.

Art of Fact:

Let me tell you a story about water:

Once upon a time there was us.

America’s thirst tried to drink us away.

And here we still are.

^* The prayer of an Elder Mojave woman shot in the head and throat by two rubber bullets as she sat in prayer before a tractor and a row of German shepherds barking against their leashes at the site of yet another pipeline.

^** The last love letter written to the last river. It was the wish of the last river that the letter not be made public until 100 years after her death.

Isn’t the Air Also a Body, Moving?

It holds the red jet of the hawk

in its hand of dust.

How is it that we know what we are?

If not by the air

between any hand and its want—touch.

I am touched—I am.

This is my knee, since she touches me there.

This is my throat, as defined by her reaching.

What pressure—the air.

Buoying me now along a minute

the size of a strange room.

Who knew air could be so treacherous

to move through? An old, anxious sea,

or waking too early in a coppered

and indigo morning,

or the bookmark she left

near the end of the book—

all deep blues and euphemisms

for my anxieties.

Sometimes I don’t know how to make it