I once loved a man whose name meant bird
or battle cry. I came to him in my raiment
of feather-hood and spear, clipped and glanced,
all clever-mawed,

but he had three minds about him
and of these I tracked the second,
whose gilt tongue and shield
keyed shut a door of secrecy in me

agape for the months of bitten
touch and woven dark
I had come to call my own.
In his warring house

I lived like a snake under the floorboards
or an eel in the rush
and narrowed him like an arrow
in every quaking corridor.

The final days of our argument
collided on a hill-quartered landscape
I named Valley of the Hoof-Trampling,
where I countered his wandering glint

until the sun drew the spreading night
into relief. We slept on a mat
of crow and wolf claw and rose
to continue our opposing.

He let go a stone.

The moment leapt up my throat
like a salmon in the crevices of the sea
who mouths the wave in its jaw
and the moon in its desperate swim-spasm