—After Ada Limón

All that birdsong in the winter scrub,
wrentit and fox sparrow, drab towhee
under cover of green tongues—
coyote mint and wild lilac.

Listening, you say
it’s like the sound of thinking.
Or camouflage, I say,
the earth

masking its secret music.
Now we hear the freeway
hum in the distance
and I remember

our walk on the salt flats
in Death Valley, the silence
there,
huge and physical, pressing

so we heard nothing
but
our heartbeats,
stood listening

with our bodies
to our bodies,
the rivers braiding inside us, two
creatures under a wallop of sky.

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