GRAY MORNING

In the gray morning, the earth soaked with three 
days rain, the sky drizzle gray and the earth 
soft with its wet, and the mist settling 
low smoke in the canyon, yellow grass dripping 
and white bones scattered like a flock of snow geese 
shimmering against the gray, we walk 
through a forest of yucca and a cloud of meadowlarks 
singing on black stalks to the ghosts of moths.

We cross the arroyo, boots sticky with mud.
Drizzle dances on stalks of rusty grama 
and rosettes of purple tansy. A killdeer frets 
and snow geese rise like bones from the earth.
Your head is wrapped in a gold and gray 
kafeyeh. Beads of rain arc from your lashes, 
your face moist with mist, your lips 
flushed with the heat of walking, the wind 
filling your eyes with prisms of water.

We dream of hot soup and tea and the good 
heat of many blankets, and how skin with skin 
warms longer and deeper. But why 
be anywhere else? - this earth soaked 
with rain, this sky weeping mist 
and geese, the yielding softness of loam 
and flesh, and the wet of eyes and lips 
and the dark soil swollen and dripping.

Together we define a space of humid
darkness, of soft grayness, of bird song
drifting with mist and the gentle merging
of sky and earth with water and skin,
that which moves and moves. And we move
easily through it, the boundaries seamless, 
indistinct, this one love-soaked landscape.



© 2004 by Richard W. Todd

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