Skying

Skying

Skying

I found the pelvis of an elk
and a rose quartz rock,
at the foothills of snow-dipped
Bear Tooth Mountain.
 
The forever blue
absorbing perspective,
my peripheral vision
is eyeballs in my ears.
 
I hear the endless expanse
and I have seen sky before,
I have exhaled and
felt like I was
 
blowing the clouds,
sending them to scurry
across all the rose and violet
the setting sun could cough,
 
and then disappear
into all the orange yolk
the rising sun
could breakfast.
 
But now it’s as though
I see this blue
for the first time
and I am falling into it.
 
The breeze in the rushes
whispers like water
cools the wet hair
against my neck.
 
Dry prairie winds
have burnt my skin foreign,
I see faces in the fool’s gold
on the rocky bed of the River Bighorn.
 
Constable once wrote
I have been doing some skying
and I have sat on this rock
in silence since morning.
 
Eagles soar and I cannot
look anywhere else
but up, it’s like watching you
undress for the first time.
 
I see the whole
of you and I am
so small and
inconsequential.
 
I want to sit with you
like this all day.
I stare as you grow
the purplish of dusk
 
in sudden shadows
of the mountain.
I take a bottle out of the
cool river and I drink
 
to this sunset
and to the moon rising,
as I hear coyotes call
for nightfall.