On a rise in New Mexico,
the flower-woman's house sits,
flat, like a mesa, fenced.
In the same compound, three crosses answer
every hour of the day to tourists'
curiosity, and I feel like Barabbas
at the crucifixion, sneaking my looks
over the fence without paying the fee.
We won't find her dead in there.
The sun sets wide of us,
and we are still wet from our swim
in the high-desert lake,
where, on shallow red shelves,
we had sex. Underwater, a vagina
turns from the petal-flesh of flowers
to the petal-flesh of flowers in zero-gravity,
weight-free and almost invisible. Almost,
we had forgotten the fisherman. Why
are they here, the crosses? We struggled
to hide nudity, peeling wet suits
from shoal-scraped skin behind the mass
of our rental. If the native noticed,
we never knew. Both of us hoped that he had.

05/12/2010

Posted on 05/12/2010
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