Where do I take this poem of stifled language and expected glimmerings? An evening? A family of mule deer quiet and slowly showing? I rounded a bend and a man put his hands to his lips pointing and whispering mule deer. A bend in the complexities of being just one. The sun was setting the deer were walking. An arroyo and then one crossed my path and then another one juvenile ran another. They kept revealing. In creosote and scrub brush. As if all things were possible and their ears their darker feathered parts were attuned to more than.

Heads nudging toward. A path a field a space untended.

Briefly golden. A space empty and full at the same time. I note the way the feet are placed. Delicate stiltings in dirt in words. Moving in a darning way the reddening mountains. A sudden flip but their ears were not scared just clearing a shift.

The deer clustered now dark grouping in dried underbrush golden threaded in the flaring sun over there over in a place where there is no longer revealing. A field suddenly with. There was a shift a sharpening. The sun dipped behind the mountains and the deer were nuzzling. It was a space cloven and new. It was an image collected in the gathering dark.

There is a square. The square is lined. Pots, crates, tomato scaffolding. There are planters. There are more pots. There is an old log. Lugged from Pojoaque. To sit on the cement. To be scratched. It is late afternoon. It is warming the sun lasts longer there is a radio playing. There are cats lounging in the shade. The calm of an afternoon in the desert. A deep quiet. Subsisting. Surviving. Holding the body in a stillness until the crisis of heat is over.

Even though it is spring the impulse is early and strong.

The act of making a space. A person in that space. The obscene thought of setting invisible boundaries.

I have written this two times before an attempt to envision the violence of a backyard.

I make you wear a condom. But then I don’t. We must pretend that we have met anew.

But the yard is now turquoise. A man sprayed for an hour, methodically, carefully moving across an imagined grid. Emergent herbicide. The onslaught, the windows that are not good, the dust that works its way through the cracks carpets the ledges.

The cats tiptoe among the painted mustard, the bermuda grass. I grew cosmos last year and the seeds wanton and brash in their spreading the ground luxuriant with small pronged seedlings. The rain runoff.

Aborted field. Tensile rows. Fits and stops. Neighbor tells me he will be going to the hospital this week for surgery. Mimes getting dizzy and holds on to the wall.

A branch came down in a wind storm. The jagged edge of the stump. The soft canopy now a closer blanket fringing the dirt, the rocks, the stained grass and mustard. A small change in elevation.