Chinese picture jasper
Our memory
is a place
like Chinese picture jasper
slow-cooked
by chaos hands’
ecology dice
remember
the red-maroon days
the mineral fields
of skeleton tree
& warm infinity sands
what luck we had then
the buffalo looked like ideas of buffalo
form black & soupy
drawing out division
of iron from ether
remember
the red-maroon days
when we shared blood & bone with dust
below the black moon
[you can watch it sit still
on a rectangular cut slab
like a window into us
a poem of passing
whittled to a point
through details refined
by some unchosen arbiter
what he wants of it
anyway]