Squad cars and shooting stars,
    the lights,
driving from the academy,
little seizures of red and blue, surgical fluorescent whites,
the police make shivering bulbs of light
on the highway home at night
in this city of stars, the cosmopolis Las Vegas. We make the stars.
    The vista wrenches open from far west Vegas,
the grid of the city
    a deranged square,
bowl of luminescent balls and bulbs, small glowing of each house,
the stars above only soft insistence in orange cream.

    The inwardness away,
the other territory of human life,
the Egyptian distance,
    when the sekhem
ruled,
    the folded cloth, the placenta, the hawk, and the scepter,
the power of the land
lived in the essential, the power, the control, of the soul,
lived in the bodily terrain of the dead,
lived in the light of the casing.

    This morning,
I drink Egyptian licorice in the sun.
    I shine.

Through dry abandoned Cairo,
hiking the slumber or paralysis,
past closed shops and empty streets
in a sun that is bright beyond thought, and confuses,
    the smell of day old preparations
clinging their waft
to shuttered restaurants,
those old savors, old meats,
the air beginning to clear
just slightly of the miasmal diesel and dust
that clots to brown mist in rain,
    to the amphibian protesters who pray and sleep in mud
in squares.

    Pelops and Heiron’s man drove brown horse muscles
beside Alpheos’ mutable, brittle shines,
with green, dreaming patterning beneath,
    in different years,
gathered in the arms of Dionysus out of time,
those muscles verged toward gold in the sun,
the verge toward effulgence,
reflective juice in the sweat from the chariot.
    Horses, gods, and light,
lead my radio.

    Will there be spumes of milk and nectar sprayed from trees
for osmotic, effortless consumption?
    The pure equivalence of grass and bodies,
where we also eat the sun?
    The nakedness always, effortless in the streams
that do not even clothe us they are so clear?
    This dazed pageant of berries and wind?

    The light,
the green of working earth,
of poems and operations,
    it moves.

I have been wondering lately
what is inside of the mountain? And what is it like to be there?
    This is what I think about.
Does the mountain shine?

The puppy in front of me filled with so many natural leaps,
fluid paw placements,
fits these rocks, as I fit these rocks
with my innumerable steps.
    The moss, the only moss in Nevada, hides on the rocks of this valley,
on the crumbled green bottom of this canyon,
by the small falls bright with ice,
pines deranged into bulbous curls by years of current,
    the soft encasing of the air infused with water
distilled from snow,
passionate clear ether of that air which gathers me tangibly.

    I climb past mountain goats,
to where the soil ends,
where the world has gotten too tall for dirt and plants,
and grab the naked stomach of the mountain.
    The outside of the mountain glows black and hot
with February sun,
and perhaps
the inside of the mountain glows black and hot. I do not think this.
    I believe the inside of the mountain
is like the air around the mountain,
I believe it is like the pines,
the green pine-light.

    I am alone with something difficult
when I am with the mountain.