Itwon’t leave me, that dead skunk, thirty-three miles

from Fort Collins.  The serumran out

ofthe medicine moon, and someone minutes ahead

struck the poor thing dumb.  Thestupid

andincessant blatting of sheep

disturb the tranquility of the range.

Blackand white are the same, that zebra hide

ofthe heart.  It keeps saying up ishurt, down

isdead, neutralize the nostrils so both breaths

areone.  For a long time I loved a lie

Icould not tell.  We could produceimpressive atavisms

bysimple equations that mirror minor chords.

Wecould place Brahms back into the belly

ofsea-lice ingesting a whale.  Ourribs

sour down through prairie flower and now.

Iloved the music of the poor thing’s death,

even where the road bends, and surely she’d love mine,

though with any luck it’s as far ahead as the taxidermy

ofa gnat.  I would just as soon pursue

thestudy of water cures and phrenology.

Only Ikkyuand you would write

about a dead skunk, John joked.

It’sbeen a long drive from there

tohere.  I tried its blood-soaked side

with the finger I’d reserved for my navel,

with the purposeful picking of possum lint

from my marsupial mouth.  Someanimals

don’t seem to sleep at all,

even when dead.  The mackerel

isan example of the human nightmare

ofceaseless swimming.  The parrot fish

exudes a mucous blanket to protect itself,

asdo yellow perch and mullet.  Only Issa

and you, amigo, could possibly thrive

all light long inside the dumb thing’s death.

Skin,they tell me, is rarely human

when glimpsed in the wild.  Somepart of me

longs for the marsupial pulsings

ofthe pouch, for a possum

night without the perfect weather

ofthe womb.  For a long time I loved alie

anda lie loved me.  Moist imprint

from life to life, tonguing me back

time and again into the intimate dark

between her thighs.  The blackdeath

upthe mountain and down makes me

noxious with underbelly-white. Skin,

Irepeat, is rarely human.

The killingof Curly Bill, Roger.  How the Earp brothers left Tombstone forhere in a hurry.  TheSpanish Influenza. Gunnison’s quarantine miraculously didn’t allow a single death, even aprairie dog or grub.  BB holes inthe chest of a pet moth.  Someonehas surely been shooting drunkenly again at the moon.  There’s an auction on eBay of an oldglass negative of bluetick coonhounds I’ve beenfollowing.  Maybe I’m lucky.  Maybe I’m not.  Maybe the world that tracks us town totown will never end.

The vast expanse of pastureis as intoxicating as feeling ordinary. I swear I’m not being facetious. Blending in is sometimes what we need.  Did you come to Marxism through archery?  By respecting the labor of yourphysician father?  Our complex bodyparts are fully awake when a child dislodges the left wing of a fly, curiousabout balance?  Animals need topolitically survive.  Kropotkin wasa prince.  Hisfather, before him.  The means of production, he says in The Conquest of Bread, should be guided by termites, impersonatinga bull ant.  Okay, it was me who said that.  Sometimes there’s death by family.  Other times, a dust-covered palominocoal-steps through the brain.  Lastweek, driving home from Laramie, I swear I felt the blatting of sheep seepthrough the cilia of my right ear, crawl all the way down from pastures of theMedicine Bow.  Don’t forget, mythorax leaked grief over a dead dog, that beagle hound I held and hold and willnever let go.

The ribcage around the heartjiggles from time to time, small breaths that keep the fire swooshing.  What was it like for Wyatt Earp torekindle a romance with Josie Marcus? How many nights did his common-law wife, Mattie, weep?  Why did Doc Holliday leave them, movingon to Pueblo, then Denver?  I keepasking myself answers.  Questioningyou as if you’re me.  Some parameciacan reproduce asexually.  Accordingto the U. S. Census, Gunnison has a total of 3.2 square miles.  All of it land, none of it water.  Where do calipers go to measure thedifference between flathead and cutthroat trout?  How can our amoeba selves ever be fullyseen without a microscope?  How manyscissors does it take just to become human, to rip apart our long-longingheart?

I keep answering myself withexceptions.  Answering yourpoems.  Your father would know,convinced you too should have become a doctor.  Was it here, or Colorado MountainCollege, where you taught summers? I’m going to pin a moth to the dark velvet of my mouth and imagine ithere.  We have been friendsthirty-five years.  In ant-years,we’ve known each other longer than a chain of bee intestines that could reachthe moon from anywhere in Arizona. You are a doctor, Roger,birthing poems, slapping their wailing ass, examining thesometimes-questionable breathing of friends in this line of poetry orthat.  Tombstone is a name boldenough to honor the longest and loneliest nap.  PagosaSprings, a cleansing rest, until we realize we are all indelibly human.  1918 took the lives of far too manygnats, delirious in the multiple rooms of weeping.  I’m thinking of 1882.  Tombstone.  The Earps’ intelligence to flee.  To spur theirponies onward through mountain-blur and snow, across Monarch Pass and all itsmetamorphoses of wingèd weather.  Imagine you with me here.  In Gunnison.  You and me togethertracking the Earps into the blowing north.  What word, whatever catch.  Whatever it means to flee the dust,pursue the new.

(for Roger Mitchell)