After Yusef Komunyakaa

Cottonwood sun slicks our foreheads
as the truck grinds through granite teeth where

my favorite ghosts drench the crag-rock, rattling
like cicadas. Gusti, you crack the brakes, slide out

the driver’s side. We unfold the webbing
of our legs, hook thumbs in what’s haunted

us this far. Winter has not wrecked us yet.
The horses thunder in star language, faces

turned to sky. War is never far in this strange country
of blood. This grief, our shared tongue and yet

the poetry of grasses, hush of ravens, and the wind
hiding its teeth. Still, the realm beyond shakes and slides

our surface layer world. Our bodies, brief as misery,
cast tissue shadows as we pray: Let all that remains here

never drift to sleep. The road unspools, abalone
wire. Spiritstalk, you warn. Some hitchhike.

You translate the wild brush and we become tongue, too,
dragged back & bloody before the churches

clutched their claims and the never-ending cosmic
joke of Crazy Horse Memorial was blasted into rock-face,

trees dynamited every couple months to accentuate
his regal nose. Perhaps, one day, a chest. & yes,

I caught faces in the rearview mirror beyond
the whorls of dust that kicked up as the truck

banged itself alive again to crack a final loop,
every wild creature gathered to form the throat

of night, loose its final cry from the rocks. We catch
the trilling in the dusk, still warm from fleeing light.