Crossing The Jordan
from DESERT RIVERS
Night comes, sharp with frost. Astringent
chill cleanses. Dreams flow, a river I cross
each waking and sleeping instant.
Starlight falls, like prickly pear tines, the moon
heavy as any succulent. Night comes,
sharp with frost, soft as the skin of a woman's
belly or the silence a dormant rattler billows. Astringent chill
cleanses frameworks of needle and rictus,
fossilized shell among cactus. Dreams flow a river.
I cross on a voyage over ice-ancient current.
I navigate by sandstone-and-basalt-
sextant, each waking and sleeping instant
coiled like the diamond back's compass, the scorpion-
scuttled, fiery caress. Starlight falls,
like prickly pear tines that guide the tortured rock
down curves, switchbacked through layers
the river carves, where the moon, heavy
as any succulent, gleams
soft as skin softly abandoned,
shines a straight path to promised abundance.
Night comes sharp with frost, refining horned toads
by its icy fires. Deep in their dens, their cold blood
slowed as astringent chill cleanses, the way
of the lizard, the long sleeps of reptiles,
streams as the moment slips. Dreams flow.
A river,
which I cross into skin,
into injury, into wind the color of a secret
long-twined each waking and sleeping instant, within
the sacred, sprawled shadow of fault lines
until ribs shudder starlight,
falls.
Like prickly pear tines, the womb my sky
makes of itself fractures as the infinite selves,
moon-heavy as any succulent, the smoke in the body delivered,
the space between each cell surrendered.
Night comes, sharp with frost,
sharp as the name of a woman in the name
of everything human. Astringent chill cleanses
vertebrae picked clean under the sun in the land of Ur.
Among the foothills of Sin: dreams, flow, a river.
I cross on remnants of a body revealed
by the weathering recursion that I revile
each waking and sleeping instant
of woman and hate and milk,
splinter my fossil, my shadow shattered.
When starlight falls like prickly pear tines, each needle
a thrust through water-
bereft air, the desert,
the weltered moon heavy as any succulent and big
as a belly round with another, or milk bright as blood,
the mothering night comes sharp with frost,
pulls the same tide that pulls
fire into being, seeded into the space between
cells, my fear. Astringent chill cleanses
but I have no name for erosion. Into the echo
of God's derision, dreams flow, a river I cross,
liquid to solid, "am I?" to "I AM!",
drought to harvest. Wind
is my body's debt each waking and sleeping
instant of doubt and baptism I walk
this gully of shattered shadow awake. Starlight falls,
like prickly pear tines or a pit viper's fangs, stings
what I've willed as taut as sacs turgid with poison.
The wild moon, heavy as any succulent,
sets in the mouth of the serpent
I am I seed I sing when I repent.
Peter Munro
If you've any comments on his poems, Peter Munro would be
pleased to hear from you.
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