1 /  HE RIDES

bulls in every rodeo he can find. 
Every Saturday night

he fights in bars.  Takes off his shirt
to counter hand holds.  Doesn’t drink, tries not to

when fighting.  Seeks only the concave feel of facial structure,
the slippery skin of cheekbones,

the line of a man’s jaw
and the cool sockets of the eyes.

He likes especially
the sound these things make

as they give way, the sound
of cartilage and how the skin slits open

before the blood begins,
the white-hard glisten of bone, the sound

of the face when it breaks. 
And he hears as if from the quiet

eye of a child’s dream,
his mother saying come home.  

2 /  AT A GIVEN TIME IN SPRING

hold my hand in the night and sing to me
across a small span of darkness

we are (stars)
face to face

in our bed.  We are Van Gogh
when I take you and draw you

so our faces touch,
hold the back of your head, small, round

in my big man’s hands, fragile, full of promise,
draw you

so my cheekbone meets yours,
arch of eye and orbital bone,

our breathing
confined,

our
gratitude

a mantel we borrow
from God.

3 /  THE STOCKMAN BAR

Montana, 1933 or today, he is seated on the ground, knees in his arms in front of the
Mercantile in a new town, looking

for work.  He will rise, cross the dirt street, approach the front door of the Stockman, door painted
black, oiled hinges, and find inside

a dim small room and tables.  Dark marble counter with five stools, the place is clean.  A lone
bartender wipes things down.

Help you? the tender says.  No, the murmur of your voice barely audible, you need a chair to sit
in, a space to calm your mind.  The bartender

spits in a tin cup on the counter.  Don’t drink, don’t stay, he says, and you feel things shutting down,
your insides heavy and tight,

the center of you like an eclipse that obscures the light, three quick steps and a fist
that rides the force of hip and shoulder:

the man laid cold on the hardwood floor.  Not dead, but still, and flatbacked, and you seated in the
chair you desired, watching the blood

curl from a three-inch line over the man’s eye, elliptic down his face to his neck to the floor.  Orbital
bone still sound.

4 /  HOUSE OF LIGHT
                                                —for Mary Oliver
                              
Good things
never end.

Kindness. 
The water of northern rivers.

The Marias. 
The Vermillion. 

The light.
The music

in your
elegant female body

from the dawn
and even yet

immortal.  I’m asking you to lay yourself down
with me, right here

where I too have laid myself down.
Your hair shines in my open hands.

Speak
so that when we fall asleep

we feel deep down below the earth the stark limbs of locust
and hawthorne,

the mountains’ whisper of thistle and bear below,
lady slipper, hollyhock, paintbrush, lupine

up through the breath
we take and give back again

until morning returns and reminds us why
we wake early.  

5 /  THE WELLINGTON HOTEL

In the half-dark in the basement of a bar outside White Sulfur he opens
the sphere of a man’s head

on the corner of a table.  The man’s brothers, the man’s friends
gather seeking revenge.  He throws

them back and breaks teeth from the mouth of one.  He throws another against the wall, snaps
            the collarbone.  You’ll leave here dead, he says,

and the group recedes, the power in him hungry like winterkill, glistening, unkempt, the young, the old,
            and he walks from the open door alone into darkness

until he sits off distant watching a spider move in a quick circle
around a grey rock by his boot,

a blackbird tilt
on the wire near his neck.