Music is the transfer of energy
from musician to instrument.
Yet the song exacts a price.
With each exchange, energy is lost.

Even birdsong comes at a price.
Birds hurry back and forth
scooping up flying insects
to carry to their young.

Yet the song of cliff swallows
nesting against sandstone cliff,
sounds as sweet as the song of cliff swallows
nesting between stucco walls.

For, whether it’s weathered foot of hoodoo,
or side of superstition mountain,
wherever your feet are planted,
that’s where you sing.

What would the river be without giving itself up?
Time, the daily scalpel, cuts away at its banks.
Eroded mountains, though they may lack
leaves, grass, or water, for that matter,
offer a wonderland of forms
that hold their ground
in sharp relief
to the sky.

If we reduced our life together to a few brushstrokes,
what would be left … The bend of my arm, your shoulder,
our bodies blending like a river course. One color of paint, two bodies.
Brushstrokes, light as feather but wide as barbs branching from the quill.

I’m not preaching minimalism. I only reflect on the reality that when we exit,
we take nothing, and what remains is only the barest trace of ourselves:
Our limbs wing like breaststrokes of the snow geese flying overhead,
their flexed muscles etched in sky, dark gray against the sky’s pool of color.

My downward gaze, your shoulder slanted towards my forehead.
As the storm raged, we grasped for footing. Our limbs entangled
like those of centaur: four arms, four legs, flailing like some apocryphal
multi-winged creature. Battered gargoyles, we move closer.

Monochrome brushstrokes, hair indistinguishable from curve of neck or back,
I accept defeat. I have no stake in this game, yield all I hold most dear, even my flesh.