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| Tosca Suto photo |
In late fall's spare expanse,
the bottle passed around the fire,
you chose to complicate your life.
Antelope leaped in the sunset.
Wild horses, drawn by the only light
for miles around, thrust in their big heads
through the shed's propped windows,
eyes like windless, moonlit seas,
nostrils flared and steaming breath,
humans up to their necks in heated water.
In such a world love-at-first-sight
was powerful and true,
even after forty years.
And then ten more,
and then ten more,
When, in an early winter,
you tried to match your thoughts
to the spareness of the season,
to flattened fields, to woods stripped bare,
to less and less of everything,
and there she stood, first love and ever dear,
High Plains snowflakes in her hair
in a storm that quenched the fires
in Yellowstone and left you burning
under cold and arid stars
in a desert of your own making.
