I sat among the stars at night,
  as a child, I soaked up from the air
  that impression of a manifest destiny:
  our every day reshaped, reborn
  a million times over among a billion
  potential suns swimming in the blackness…

Fevered, I searched my imagination for
  access—a way—and found, of course,
  television: each Saturday morning I enlisted,
  munching Fruit Loop rations.
  And through those animated frames
  shimmered a clue, a thought, a vision
  of a deeper world realized…

And sometimes all alone I admit
  to myself that I sometimes still behold
  the night sky and—like a child—allow
  wonder and terror to fill me with
  the possibilities of all creation;
  these poems I write like thick wax lines
  drawn in a Space Cadet’s coloring book…

Some Native American tribes believed
  that death is nothing more than
  a hunter who stalks us all
  impersonally, by duty.

Our tender realms of fever and sleep
  float along the edge of life’s forest;
  they dance with death, they tantalize death like
  paw prints and a fresh scent.

But evade an accident or maybe
  fall in love—for like light itself love
  flickers into being instantly and is insubstantial and so
  can never die—and you can feel your hind legs
  thrust you across the field and through the
  stream and you can hear the swoosh!—
  as the arrow slices air only to slip into water
  only inches from your head…

Or maybe you don’t feel like a fox
  (I don’t),
  maybe this life is a crisp Winter’s morning
  —the snow blooms bright in the sunlight—
  and as you smell death downwind you realize
  you’re a rabbit on the run…

I am a cousin of the American deserts;
  I visited them every year—driving
  with my family, the freeways stretching out…
  Time and distance lull and soothe and soon
  the hypnotic suggestion of the road arises, and then
  the Kingdoms of desert appear
  —California, Nevada, Arizona…

When I was a child, my family pilgrimaged
  to my grandparents’ at least once a year;
  a return to Mecca or simply spawning upstream
  for my parents, but they had no idea…
  …the majesty of this alien world we’d
  hurtle through in the night.
  I could feel the cold pulse along the station wagon window
  could feel the bite of the desert night as I shut off
  my Walkman and pressed my hands against the window
  until I slept…

I half-dreamed wolves that wander the sands
  snakes beneath rocks, skins shed in the sun
  and the mysterious origin of bleached animal bones
  dignified by dirt and sunlight and time.
  All these things and more I learned
  over the hundreds of hours of riding, of driving.
  An anarchy of nothing rules dirt like ocean
  rules water, or rather, I remember a different order:
  one of weather-worn rock and childhood mirages,
  one of silence and vast mystery.

Ripping out pages
  plucking them one by one
  —leaves or days—
  of my life and the
  leaves on the tree outside
  are a dying generation
  this Winter—every Winter…
And life is a prayer
  formed with the lips of a lifetime
  of slow time, of waiting to die,
  and the act of dying is just like
  saying “amen,” and I
  took the hymnal and I’ve been
  ripping out pages…