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What We Remember
Do you remember the great clarities of desert light,
coyote come to the ridge above our camp in dark,
the spareness of discovery, one body and another,
how clearly we could parse each other's pleasure,
the embers of a fire glowing between our knees,
our throats opened to song in the riding night?
Do you remember our entrance to high mountains
as a single soul almost, the rose-tipped rising
of great peaks at dawn, the world falling away
beneath our feet, the pull of air into lungs,
the joy that pulsed in bone and muscle,
the glacier's groan, the fertile lowlands rest?
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Do you remember the shama's fluting in the forest,
sunlight fallen straight to tree fern, pool, and runnel,
the thick moisture, tree and rock and heavy haunch
of earth one steady heat, the astonishment of life,
of its abundance, the salt-slick sheen our bodies took
among the leafy bannered banks and flowers?
Home now
after losing our path, at dusk in the familiar
room,
do you remember all the ways we've come?
Packs hung up, clothes thrown down, the steamy scrub.
This open bed, its promise steady through the years.
Each of us crossing its cool and snowy distance
in confusion and in love, desire glowing now and rising
until, again, we touch.
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