Azure

Azure

1.

What I want to reach for in the wild

landscape is your body.

The folds of your shirt curved around

your lifted arm, the wings

of your back. Your face turned toward the hillside

horizon troubles me because certainty

is unfamiliar, we are so new.

(I spent ten years

waiting for feeling.

I wanted to leap train to train,

spring up a mountain clawed and crested,

lie in a tent with stones

blading into my hips

all night.)

The bones of my body are welcome in this desert.

(I hate the desert, I said. I hate the cacti. I want to go home.)

You take my blood between your fingertips and roll the cells

like fine thread on a loom. Everything is blooming and it is spring.

2.

Before we ever touched, you returned to me a story

that I had mislaid.

The vast blue of desert sky over my girl-eyes,

back flat on the ground,

runner’s breath into the azure

that pressed me down.

Vast I said. And blue. How do you

know, when you are nine,

that you are touching sacred space?

How do you know, when you are

thirty-nine, or fifty?

: When the lover disappears and the beloved disappears.

When there is nothing but sky.

3.

(The desert scared hell out of me and I was foreign in it,

unfound. Detroit, I chanted. Concrete. Clouds.

I threw out two ice scrapers, a steel snow shovel,

and all of my super-wool up-north socks.

No one listening.

Leather jacket! Bar shows,

gyrations, gasoline.

)

Your face turned toward the hillside horizon is an act of love. Poetry,

I said quietly.

Thirty feet east could be the one.

4.

The desert sings to you and you follow the rituals in the song.

My dark bird self-flung into the canyon,

landing nowhere. Symbols drained, incantations lost

their comfort. Taken down. Your face turned to the hillside.

Horizon your face. We walked together in the desert

and I felt the sky again.

Turned.

(Aging invisible as torn paper,

silence a cotton choke, unseen accretion

crudely swallowed.)

Turned and saw. To the hillside, the plants—

And stones, the first one picked up and carried talismanic,

glinting chips of mica through the knuckles of my fist.

Spines and nodules, tangles, 

mats of bristling defense

in starlike heat exposed. My face raw and recognized.

Beyond ground, we reach the wild landscape.

I open my throat to the hum we make.

Six miles apart, you hold my blood between your fingers.

Welcome, body, home. 

-Amanda Michno