Love and Doubt

1. How we position ourselves

for our inner audience:

you the reconciler, I the fighter

who besets you and is embraced finally, all

I’ve ever wanted from anger. You see honesty

in me—after water, it alone saves us.

I will always be the rattlesnake

sidewinding your desert, the wash

flooded, then dry, the acid pool

that burns you down to life’s essentials.

Come closer, I say. Wash your hands.

2. Our story truly began when you plucked me

too young to bloom from a dry bed—tequila spines

drawing your blood. You anchored a desert

garden with me: Mexican primrose, the invader,

ice plant with its jelly bean leaves, pink pussytoes

for gossip—even yucca, that loner, as a sentinel.

And always, the romance of the yucca moth.

Dizzy with love, you would divide me, sink me

in pots for others to plant, in all 200 countries.

But I say, don’t return me to any bed but yours,

keep me where light is a scar. Sun-lover,

I need to burn in summer. Your hands

make my home, my rebirth. Come now. Dig.

3. You, the bight of refuge

at the base of a canyon,

scatter of pebbles in front

the seep chill on my back

and then it comes: rills sinuous

down a pommel of sunset stone

I slip into the cut wall that holds

me as rain lathers down

sandstone my bed and water

my lit curtain I open my mouth

to you

Published in WinningWriters.com, April 2004 (as “Three Declarations”)