My Lost Suns

Dear mother fields of tumble brush, let me come home,
escape me to unsullied beginnings.

I point there with one finger and say exile.

See how I have no right to say exile except for the right
Adam retained when expelled from Eden
to name and rename abandonment?

I say exile as approximation, as when discovering a beast I can’t identify
with a broken back on the roadside.

I say home and mean waterless creek bed, the crush of creosote and rained dirt,
the gridless acreage of thorn-flesh and lightning-shock.

I say watch me watch us
as if two storms separated by great distance.

My dear dust, what remains of my beginnings
but the part that survives in the thud of fallen oranges?

Help me now, whoever you are hearing this, to harness my lost suns.

If you’ll kindly carry them back to me from that place in the glinting
pails of your eyes, here to this claustrophobia of trees,

I will kiss your hands and reach one arm to the left, one to the right—

I will hold you in the desert warmth still rising long after dark.