Three Poems

Our Honeymoon

was a strand of scenic overlooks. 
I first wrote strange

       —a strange of scenic overlooks—

my mistake, and strange enough 
was everything bathed in the red 
Mars dust of Sedona,
the iron in the rocks aligned 
with iron in our blood,
they say, so it tugs on us.
It tugged. Every night
on Airport Mesa, a crowd gathered 
and the Milky Way made a white mess 
of the sky. Was I the only one
who’d wanted to polish it
black again? Our honeymoon
was a scene of stranded overlooks.
We posed for panoramic
photographs minus the photographs. 
Behind us the canyon was banded 
red, copper, purple

       —millions of years
       of compressed sunsets—

where the river had gnawed 
down to bone, down
to its strange, scenic marrow.

The soybean fields flooded and froze over,
and the boys—not yet their father’s sons, not yet

worrying about crop stubble beneath the ice— 
skate, twilight settling in their hair,

until their mother, watching at the window, 
calls them in for supper. When it’s dark

they’ll sit elbow-to-elbow at the worn farm table 
each son will want when she’s gone,

ringing spoons against the sides of bowls,
that silver-on-ceramic note. But now they glide

across the ice, not yet worrying about surfaces 
that barely hold them, and there is nothing

between them and their mother but the clear
syrup of old glass. It moves so slowly, no one sees.

Beloveds, I keep picturing it
this way: we’re standing, all of us,

between the Bear and every creature 
the Bear calls prey, and half of us

step aside. Half of us aren’t enough
to hold the Bear. It lumbers,

then, in a blur of claws and mange, 
charges through. What did you think

would happen? The Bear would lose 
its appetite? The Bear might be tamed

with a tiny bicycle, a propeller hat,
a gold sphere to balance on its nose?

I don’t need to describe what happens 
next: the smell of blood, the surprise

of white femur. Ones I have called 
beloved, I keep picturing you

this way: sitting off to one side, 
watching the Bear work, waiting to see

if it leaves any meat on the bones.