After Stieglitz was gone,
in the fifties — later,
in the Ghost Ranch years,
I imagine her making
secret trips to Taos.
And where
Muerte,
       Anderson’s,
               Moon Baby Tattoo
are today
there must have been
a little place
off the plaza
where she got inked,
out of favor,
Manhattan culturati over
hollyhocks and skulls
as quickly as they staled
on clown car bows
and microskirts.

There is a photograph of her
from the late seventies,
sitting on a gnarled oneseed juniper
as though it was a bench,
in a navy-blue wrap
and canvas slippers.
Sensible shoes,
the kimono collar of her robe
framing a face the sun claimed
years before,
from
      rock, chamisa.

Underneath the robe,
invisible to fame,
to confusion,
an earth dragon
with a peach in its mouth,
made of smoke, soot, grief,
circles her arm;
a grassland hare mimics
her melancholic smile,
a pineapple covers
a sailor’s cock;
a gray wolf is weeping.

When conservators cleaned
her paintings she insisted
they remove the dirt, even
if it took color with it,
even if the image suffered.

The secret of bone,
after all,
is
what
it

isn’t.

My father in a monochrome picture, seated,

a hawthorn hedge behind,
a solar flare in his lap:
the one time he held me happily.

Battle Hospital, Reading.
At the end of the ward a coronal mass,
a buck nosing the salver:

he doesn’t look up as I blow through the window, wailing.

There’s a girl at Madame Mutty’s, down the chestnut walk,
who takes my ear for paper.

She cuts it with a plastic scissors, applies nettle, patent leather:

A child, after all, is a series of separations.

Our first love is always pain.
I see her in the schoolyard, cherubic, clouds forming.

At Alcaufar the Spanish housekeeper burns ditches
behind our rooms; an immolation of grasshoppers.

I stand on a low wall; I scream, I throw stones.

Neighbors report a tongue of flame, smoke snaking his hair; his catapult hands.

There is nothing between the earth and sun that is not afraid of the dark.

A cloud of pink floss races across the chasm, tasting like strawberry lipstick.

I release the brass buckles of her top and she watches,
eyes gapped, as though it needed remembering.

And where growing has made little tears in our skin, we repair them with our lips.

Assemble the parts that came with your childhood. There should be a king snake, an old man from Mumbai, a cigar box; cruelty, yours.

When someone calls him a fur baby,
strip down to your underwear in the snow.
Scream silently.

Place your iPhone in a bag of rice. Leave it on the dresser overnight. This should draw out the 2,834 photos of Liam kneading your chest. Dispose of the bag properly.

Remember being broke, December at the Walsenburg truck stop, the trailer rocking between long-haul semis three hundred and sixty-three miles from home? How he slept in the crook of your arm.

Forget that one. If it doesn’t work, wait thirty seconds. Try again.

Our bay foal last month, his leg hanging useless, the deputy called from the canteen. The cartridge that killed summer. This wasn’t that.

If you have them handy, collect the perfect head of a hummingbird, the tansy-aster gone to seed, Cassiopeia’s flaming star. A shadow moving across the shortgrass.

Tie them together with hemp string. Place them on his grave. No one will know.