In the desert only small, stout flowers
impossible to avoid, whose heads I clobbered all day
then watched night freeze them up. In the morning,
the steam rising where I puddled myself behind a bush,
the coyotes woke with me, calling across the valley
to another family, or their own—it didn’t matter
that you weren’t there. It didn’t matter that the superbloom,
which I had flown a thousand miles to find,
was too far south to reach from there. Instead,
big hunks of quartz to hold in my lap,
which I let charge themselves into my palms,
though I had never learned what exactly it was
or how, really, to let it work through me.
Eventually, I think I absorbed something—the steady
oath of solitude, the authority. The impossibility
of blooming love in any body, except my own
dusty gut. And I did: chin lifted
to the Joshuas’ white snakehead of an opening,
the crows huffing, shuffling as the sun
raised herself through the boulders,
propping her tired elbows on that frozen earth,
the night-stiffed flowers straightening
their thin spines.
