At Monticello the skeletons assemble,
buried trade beads brought to light
gleam like ruin run glamorous alluvium:

evidence of someone else's way through valleys
dense, interior and distant. I want for hands
in ocher, for one whose hands once held my own.

I learn to long for thought arising through the floor
of my mind, a song alone in sound
recessed into the small noise of my breath.

The tongue turns--
It may be asked, why I insert
the mammoth as if
it still existed? I ask in return
why I should omit...

I am little more than a string figure, one
of a divided couple danced into a seam of time
At the margin of such desolation a relic so worn

bears no odor

He may well exist there now
as he did formerly where we find his bones.
The eye of a storm stares inward:

all fallen together, yours for excavation.