Outside of Boise, four black horses bolt
quickly past my window, slow to a trot,
then pull away, their obsidian coats
shimmering like sunlight on the blacktop.
I am barely awake. The night before,
in the panhandle of Oklahoma,
I fixed a flat tire in a lightning storm,
watching the dense nerves of light branch over
the blue nimbus clouds in the northern sky.
There was no sound, other than the engine.
On such a night, Saul may have held his knife
closer to his chest—by morning, the sun
nothing more than a warm breath on his cheek,
his horse leading him into the city.

to visit the bed of an old lover.
What do I tell her—Do I fill her head
with secrets, or brush the truth like dander
from my hair? There is no balm in Gilead,
this is not manna, nor gossamer flakes
from desiccated saints whose frozen ash
melts on my tongue—it is the Cascade’s
autumn wind blowing through Snoqualmie Pass,
shaking the white crowns from the evergreen.
On the outskirts of Moses Lake, a crow
skims their broken tips—like an augur’s dream
scattered by daylight on the open road,
it wings irrespective of my vision,
angling lightly over Washington.

In spring, fireweed sprouts above Puget Sound,
rose-tipped cairns that lure a flock of seagulls
downward, winter-worn, to form a hill’s crown.
In the mouth of the bay, a tugboat’s hull
severs the slack water like black fabric,
the shape of the prop-wash an oil-green trail
that opens as a fan. The captain flicks
his cigarette butt against the ship’s wheel
and turns south to the beach, taking a fix
on the basalt cliffs at the shoreline’s rim,
the chalk-white shelves collapsed above the rocks.
He charts a constellation on his arm,
the face of a hill which blooms in a rash—
the birds now spiraling upward like ash.

She’s been here before. The grass takes skin
as payment—thought swells past its given size,
a swollen court convened to discipline
the body it inhabits and denies.
The sun impresses dull authority
upon her cheek, a mark that does not ask,
as if the field had staged her silently
with milkweed stalks and hydrangea husks.
She flares her nostrils. Breathing, she decides,
is thread pulled thin toward nothing she can see,
or cloudstuff waiting, stalled and undefined.
Meanwhile the sun, exact in appetite,
burns through the afternoon without appeal—
pure self, consuming what it cannot feel.

Your sins, random in youth, now interlace
as latticework in time you cannot leave.
You feel the warp and weft secure their place,
a frame that learns your shape by odd degrees.
Branch braided into limb, vine into nerve,
misjoined, yet fastening the life you own—
a blighted map you follow, swerve by swerve,
to hollows cupped beneath the oldest stone.
A scold of jays flutters just behind your ears,
their cries dispersed throughout the evening air;
the canopy comes loose. You stand and hear
your years let go, like leaves, like thinning hair.
The crown gives way. What sang departs the head.
You keep the frame. The body learns instead.

In 2012 the ending failed to appear.
The clocks kept faith. The world refused delay:
history, relieved, went back to its career
of working slowly through us, day by day.
My daughter wakes. The room is thick with care—
the kind that counts, corrects, anticipates.
I feel my past arranged behind her stare,
a set of habits posing as her fate.
She has my look—the practiced doubt, the strain
of weighing kindness always for its cost.
I see my life already in her way,
a path laid narrow, difficult to cross.
She’s my stark mirror, shimmering in time
like silver wrapping paper catching light.

I.
Part of my voice died with you—halted, thin,
abrupt as aspens cut at timberline,
where snow keeps working talus down to stone,
stripping the ridge to bone by frost and brine.
I’ll never see your brooding eyes again,
nor hear that timbre when I bend to drink
and take the brook’s cold mouth in a tin canteen
beneath the blunt insistence of the wind.
You’ve become enjambment—memory’s ridge,
mountain and scar, past lovers set like signs:
blue columbine and monkshood at the edge,
some doubling back where judgment breaks its lines.
The trail repeats, then fails, then disappears;
the line gives way beneath accumulated years.

II.
We ate raw rhubarb high on Bristolhead,
panned pyrite out of Gunnison’s cold run,
took quartz and petrified wood, long dead,
from scabbed-out peaks that blistered in the sun.
I was too young to know your Buddha calm,
to know you pitied him, not favored him;
your cocked eyebrow I took for ease or charm,
not skepticism honed and sharpened grim.
Still, anguish moved behind your steady gaze—
those brown eyes held what ghosts refuse to flee.
We burned inside that house in early days;
I mourned you then, though blind to what must be.
Grief came before the words to fix its name;
the house went down, the heat in us the same.

III.
You bore your scars like maps the body keeps,
learned without words, folded under skin,
until the fire took flesh in ordered sweeps
and left the rest for ritual to begin.
Your ashes wait beside a conqueror’s cairn,
a folded flag, my window’s narrow ledge,
to cross Mt. Holy Cross, be overthrown
into the Great Divide, past brink and edge.
We burned in that house—all of us—and still
you carried fire farther than the rest.
Snow works the talus down against its will;
the ridge accepts what will not be confessed.
No voice survives intact what must be given;
the offering lifts and thins itself to heaven.

I.
In nineteen-ten they woke to thunderlight
at Windy Mountain. Snow sheared from its shelf,
fell like a body from a great height,
took Bailets Hotel, took the track itself,
took cars and men and mailbags in its run
and drove them through the dark into the trees.
The Spokane Express was torn apart, undone.
The sun rose on a valley filled with wrecked degrees
of iron: boilers split, pistons bent,
sandpipes cinched tight around the standing pines.
They counted ninety-six dead from the rent
of snow and steel, laid them along the lines,
and sent them down on sleds. The mountain held
the rest; the river held what bled and cooled.

II.
Two lawyers jumped from Twenty-Five and lived.
They slid the switchbacks under Cascade Tunnel,
came down end over end and rose half-given
to breathe again. Below them lay the funnel
of dark and quiet—Jesseph, Merritt, snow
packed in their cuffs. A whiskey flask went round,
the proof passed hand to hand. Yet just below,
they found Ms. Starret pinned where branches wound
her to the wreck. Her infant lay beneath
her breast, the crying gone. Another son
they cut free living, blood along his teeth,
a stick drawn from his head. The work was done
by lanternlight. The snow came down anew
and covered what the night let through.

III.
You brought me here among the dead,
among the names fixed at the rim—
a nurse, a child, a writer gone to bed.
You knew what weight I’d carry in.
The wire burns between my hands, above
the cliff where alder closes over ruin.
What did you want? I bring you nothing of
the relic kind—no leaf from Bhutan,
no cuspid from Siddhartha’s mouth, nor canine
splinters lifted from the rood of Calvary—
I only cede the ice-tipped thorns of Whitebark pine,
the ash of our own catastrophes
shook from the severed veil
and scattered along the Iron Goat Trail.