This one I couldn’t hold:
 he’d gone bottom-fishing in his own head,
 deciding what of me to keep.

 Finally surfaced in a flurry of bubbles:
 I said strange weather ever since you got back

 and his eyes said yes: his eyes were everywhere
 clouded and cast on my skin which could feel
 what his fingerprints were thinking.

 Through rainclothes our blood made a lazy agreement
 and my skin began its dream through his hands,
 through their myth of Middle America, their invention

 of prairie songs and rough timber.
 In his palms I saw maps of red dust and rivers—
 saw them pressed to me, saw them lifting
 to show their lines in arrows on my skin.
 My blood in barrel knots I was caught in his ring of prayer
 and so turned to the gods of the lake: let me absorb
 some geography of elsewhere, mark the crossroads of two rivers
 on the small of my back. On my ribs, the saloon’s swinging door.