Retiring to the Desert

by Jessie Jones 

Speak, inviolate flux of the howling

place unseen. Stepping over a ledge

of grief, I take one after another

without ever feeling my feet. Sun laps

at the earth’s bright bowl until it squeaks clean.

A garden overgrows its walls and goes

to seed. Wind shreds the black locust,

petals fracturing the land into dizzying

abstract. The laudable ease of leaving.

A laugh from the high whorling

linden and the grass stunned

upright sings. The oscine ties bow

after bow with its looping call.The chorus

conquers. The road forward makes no

promise of flowers. The weave

of the world tightens. Reach through the chaos

of nature and its green heaving breach.

Make me green in the light of its eye.

Ready me for absence. Alight on me

in your crazed way, beams like fricative

fingertips in the folds of my brain. Runnel

a passage, bless this end, and I will finally drink

where the horizon bows heady and low

to the perfect cold, to an auroral jade

raging through the hemisphere. I have seen

what goes there, seen the stone path close

around my pink halo. A gum around a fang.

A tongue around a word. I do not wish to heal

from this. A sarabande splits the land

from the sky and the mountains

flow between them. I carry nothing

but the most peaceable forgetting.

From on high, I see twice. All the adjectives

of daylight shout. If I have any doubt, pull me up

by my roots. They are thirsty for the world

behind the eyelid, where even sight cannot touch.