At first scent, I tilt my head to one side.
This is the smell of my memory.

Once when I thought I knew what it meant
to grow old, I threw oranges, half mush

into tree-trunks just to hear the sound
of flesh ripping open.

In one half hour the air consumed by orange.

Biting into thick skin, the tongue swells, the feather
layer stuck to the back of my front teeth.

Nothing as cruel as an orange.

Just boys, we gathered jelly-fish by the pound.
Buckets lined the dock seeming, at first glance,

to be filled with water; no one paid attention.
One by one we lifted their bodies

above our heads, and brought them down
on hard pine. Plasma bodies explode

in every direction. Laughter smells like orange.
In the sun, from a distance, wet with flesh

we must have reflected, diamond like.

Once, when we thought we knew what it meant
to be young, we laughed about the oranges,

the baseball windup, the arm extension, the release,
the impact, the damage to the half dead fruit.

This same night, the stars still drifting stale
light I close my eyes, and in the palm of dream

a globe of orange-flesh, the peal long withered.
You and I begin to eat, slowly, single slices

until it is gone, this is what we remember, sharing
fruit, and when finished you reached out and wordlessly

wiped my mouth clean.

                                            For Janice

She speaks to a room full of boys.
Sa'qant' yx s'a qan — sacred bird
whose feathers cascading down
an old man’s back captured on the silver
emulsion equals sacrilege. She tells
her story to make them understand.
This renamed land fills with dances.
The body a tango of history.
The people born by coyote,
carved from monstar’s bloody bone.
The reflected light gathered back
to a specific point, bent by glass
and contained on paper destroys
the body contorted into animal.
Just as a quick spit of laughter
can cover her deepest sorrow.

Split-open my heart
let the lion and pebble and child
spill from my chest. What example
am I to these young men?
I have no myth I can see as clearly
as the droves of eagles returning
each year filling these trees
with their white heads. Let me suffer
for love, and cease this small cry and crack
the dark box to expose the inside to sun.

Wading against currents, sand bars channeling glacier
water into the ocean, we watch the collision of fresh and salt.
Waxwings loop through Alder and Ash, their affiance songs

echoing in waves. Adaptation is necessary here, animals needing
mixture and movement: egrets, sea catfish, plankton, and red-winged
blackbirds—purple-brown eggs cupped in marsh or reeds.

This is the annual resting site, the pause in long days of flight,
of wind and air, the vernal and autumnal pit stop, a massive gathering
of crustaceans, benthic fauna, geese, mussels, a conjugal meeting,

a nursery of salmon and trout. Sand moves by saltation: small stones skipping
through the bed load. Like POGs I used to find on the bottom of juice cartons,
Passion, Orange, Guava, the blend of tropical fruits transformed into a game

of discs slamming into discs, which kids collect like baseball cards.
We are searching for something. Something to carry home and not kill.
Already dead sand dollars, white as teeth, scatter on the surface. We know

beds of purple live below the sand, live circles, tube feet pulling particles
of food to their centers. We frisbee the dead into the wind, white kites rising,
displacing seagulls with their shadows, landing in a chuppah of cottonwoods.

We want the length of beach, smell of burning driftwood and tide pools. We want
the meeting of two waters, marriage of solutions, we want to be sluiced by salt, we
want our world as devoted as a suttee, the nourishing ash, we want the diverse

and sudden call of death, rising in wind, united in a shivaree of waxwings
holding together an alter of air, the flash of a red shoulder, the final call for more.