Snow has swallowed my home
the mountain where I live
and all of the sounds usually heard
scurrying between pinon and cholla
I have a desire to catch flakes
on my tongue and ask for their medicine
to quiet me also
instead I unlatch you
greeted by your chestnut face and laced rosette
a skin unlike your many sisters
which have slipped through my aging hands
I tuck my fingers behind your neck
and think if someone saw
the way I lift your body
they would see how much I need you.
Out of the velveteen shell
you move me from cramped spaces
so I may hold you, equally liberated
I press into your steel cords with blunted fingers
and remember
when the pain of you calloused me
and that callouses are less about pain
and more about the fortification of song.
I wonder who made you, glazed and rimmed with fire
you are so like me
empty enough inside
to let music billow
knocked and scarred
but connected to a language
that does not speak
to a beauty that has never seen itself
when your parts are tightened, or loose,
your quality does not shift from good to bad
the song simply changes
I find the Vedas in you
divine underpinnings
of non-duality, and quantum fields within which
one touch between us
makes the whole room hum
one sound, dendritic and proliferating
transcends the walls.
I pull you into my stomach
as I did when I was twelve
and play you, but mostly I listen
as my wrist carries the strum
I let your voice leak into me, slowly
like snow melt seeps through the cracks
of the high desert
and hydrates thirsty roots, quenching everything
on its way down
crystalline flecks formed
and returned into emptiness
somewhere along the way
replenishing the mountain
with a language that does not speak.