Again

For so long tucked under
forgotten mud where the wistful leaves kept on dying,
yearly burying themselves as if out to reinvent the earth.

Parched stone story, like a book pressed openside down,
and the ground reading it, stunned: letter
from an old love still capable of paining. Moonstones shard, darkside

now exposed to light. I stayed clear
of the woods in windstorms: fear of blindness in the thickets
slapping at my face. I stayed clear of the open where gales like harsh silence

close in more darkly than arms. Like the deer against the stone
wall, I am a creature of edges: edge of longing, edge of danger,
edge of change, of death. But this tripped me up: rash edge

of rosetta stone kicked up from the dust
like mail delivered by simoom. Now it falls to me, lies heavy
in my hands. How do you put it back, take back

what the wind said, puzzle out like an unpleasant clue the errant stone
in the shoe. Because now all the pieces overlap--their precarious edges
won't snap into place--hard angles frayed. Sharp bedrock, surfaced.

Last word, fossil. Pollen hurled from the flower
of the cactus that blooms in the desert only once
in a hundred years: the language of wanting, finally spoken,

has a heat, a clarity akin to air's. Through it fly bird call
to bird, wolf howl to wolf, his pleas to me flashed across the currents
of hot magnetic space: No, not again. Don't say another word.