Inside your afterword

for Stewart Warren

Where poems are a dark house on a mesa.
This room gibbous lit over banked fire.
This one dawn, and dawn and dawn.
The basement: full sun through thick aspen,
flicking light pins down a pencil thin
stream cut through ancient concrete.

The doors have no handles or locks, but swing
if I barely lean.
Some squeak. Others revolve in whispers.

Where is the floor? And how
did the quetzal find me here?
Around its leg a metal tag,
engraved Atogaki.

I hold on. We lift up.
All the windows open.
The rooftops are gone.

2011