Putting aside the fact that they are old,
which is, admittedly,
like putting aside the divinity of a god
or the black of a crow,
we understand the paintings in the Chauvet Cave
because we have been children,
because we lay awake in summer,
possessed by what we wanted and what we owned.

‘We’ll go horse riding on the beach,’
my father promised,
and I never slept, hearing the relentless
gravel pulsing of the sea,
seeing my pinto, as though he were there
— and me, straight-backed,
moving the spirited thing
with the pressure of my heel.

If I could, I also would have
ground stones to powder,
mixed fat and spit,
sketched the thin-legged horses,
their necks impossibly arched,
posed static, because they were mine.

And then, in bed,
under whatever rushes hid and warmed us,
watched the obsessive fire
trace their red and ochre lines.

But the Ensenada pony,
when I tried to ride him,
mostly stood
— tired, malnourished —
until I pulled him reluctant
to the edge of the water
uncontent and untransformed /
the dark shapes of trawlers inching
like beetles on the horizon:

paintable ships, but knowing now
how only shipwrecked sailors paint,
how only starving hunters paint.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

The house painter was leading a walk-through,
three days of spraying and staining done,
a couple of his friends tailing us
with open cans of color,
their own faces leathered,
tejano pop songs playing still
in the April sun.

‘Did you build these trails?’ he asked.
We skirted blue spruce, slid on the shingled slope
down to the woodshop.
‘No, the deer built them.’
I motioned to a pair of does
in the shadow of the olive tree.
‘Do you hunt them?’ he brightened.
‘Is it legal? Probably not legal…’

We slowed above the arroyo.
‘Hunt them? They’re family,’ I answered.
‘We watch their kids grow up —
two of them last year,
under the walkway you painted.’
But how to tell him?
About the fawn in the ditch,
the legs of stags cut apart on fences,
the lazy circles of turkey vultures
over the prairie grass.
Loss is older than hunters, I want to say.
In this fat country even their natural deaths
are in our flesh,
and not vacant, vestigial
like a tailbone,
the impotent muscles of our ears,
or what is left of a third eyelid,
couched, reptilian
against our tears.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

She begins with a guttural moan
deep in her throat, our Russian Blue,
and leans her chin close to the pile
convulsing rhythmically
like a clock hand around a spindle,
stepping and retching
always in the center of the Turkish rug,
until she spits out a blue-gray finger of fur
and walks away untroubled.

I envy her that Catholic act / how she doesn’t
notice from the damp stain
(a dun rosette, a dark red filigree)
the whole mandala of rug
snaking out in every direction,
circles within circles within borders,
each with their own gods and gardens.

How we are moving mandalas, too —
how even in some still places:
the bullring in Ronda
(the footsteps and the blood smoothed over now),
on the parquet floor of the Palladium
polished over, the boys and girls gone
to cries of pleasure and pain, to other births
and other deaths.

We clean because we are clean animals, yes,
but also because the marks of love and loss,
the damp stains of death and desire
the pentimenti of living, if they were left,
would be too bleak
and beautiful to bear.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.

It’s elk season — bow hunting,
and the burros from the ranch
across the road are grazing
next to my tent when I wake up.

No one tends them:
they come to my hand,
water boils for coffee;
they nuzzle a packet of rice and beans.

The fourteenth anniversary of my father’s death
falls in this time
of turning leaves in the high country,
of archers in camouflage.

I remember it this morning
because he also was hunted, in his way,
drinking more as the season cooled.

At the ranch, the outfitters
use the burros to bring down elk,
field-dressed, quartered,
from high up on the trail
above the aspen.

Soon the faces of these animals
will harden with work,
one step following the other

but for now they are waiting,
warm and open, watching
as I shake out the coffee cup,
tighten the straps of my pack
and start out again,
taking the dead on my back
with a kind of reverence.

Copyright © 2018 Lilibug Publishing.