Water in the Desert

                                               Things happen even here
                 hours from the outskirts of a voice

                      
                      some of us, it takes a while to notice

                        the water’s sweetness when we find some—
      a fine sand lines the bottom of a warm pool, steam

          collects in the navel, spills down the inside of a leg
                 the air on the tip of a dove’s wing slaps

                 and all the sanity wells up from the earth 
                 so we rest on its dirt, evaporate into clouds, and are glad.

                                                                           It rains for a minute
              and the shrub lets out its sly, formal smells—

                  you put an eye down into the water
               sweet and gray, warm inside the earth,
                      blurred laughter whistling on the edge of a dusted vision.

               The knife grass whistles too

            and the water blurs through
                                    a crack in the source
                                    one more tiny noise

                 off in the bushes,
                              a giggle and a bray in time,
                                                  quiet now
                 quiet quiet, look, a pool

      let’s spread a wobbling memory over it
         a world it always hurts to fill
               with warnings and inscriptions
            dissonant, competent flashes

                                           cloud with a poison gust at the tip

              the stone, the human sweat
                       Snoopy’s face spray-painted on a rock

                                   careful now, careful careful.
                            The sky changes at the spring’s source
        takes on the color of a hummingbird’s chin
          pulls my human half down into the earth’s occasion and poise
   up to my shoulders in this sane heat

           sweet on the skin
           stinks on the nose

       gravity and wind, center and ground
    laughter, the closest touching form

 ripples across the edge, puts all the self in this water
     washes off the ineluctable and supple bitterness
             of alkali dust
                            in secret over here
                              hours from the outskirts

                                       a mountain droops upside down
                                             on the surface of the pool
                                           drink and look, get a bit more distant
                                                     more thirsty, laughing quietly
                                              careful now, careful careful.