(Betasso Preserve)
The mountains and the hills
Shall break forth into singing before you,
And all the trees of the field
Shall clap their hands.
– Isaiah 55:12
Wings sweep the vista and perch
on the evergreen. Somewhere
a bird of prayer, not easily
spotted, owls its morning lauds
in full croon, as white mountain sage
opens itself to us, an incense carpet,
saying burn with me, our bodies
offered up into a brass censer.
*
On the loop ascending the templed
mesa you whisper the poem
I’ve never shared for its god-
thirst. I fail to define beauty
in the train car café as the smoke
of us swans out its neck
in invitation to climb it into a view
of all things seeded and seeding
below.
*
Have you ever seen an endangered
plant? you ask. Yes, I have been vague
in the winter, a ghost of myself
wandering, a music above the junipers.
*
Can you hear it again,
the unseen singer’s language vining
into fruiting body—?
I know this cry, but not my own
tendril body moved into song.
*
God is all who grow, God is all
who sing, God is all—
*
Once, I wanted to drink in beauty,
I wanted to glimpse that raptor.
I wanted to rapture
what stretches before me, inside:
the vista, the mountain,
the evergreen, your hat askew,
the smoldering sage. I wanted
wildflowers to bloom
their danger-fires, to open their lips,
raise their tongues
in praise, inside me; I still want
the Rockies to push up
crag and cliff, my body
meeting another burning body.
*
Chance’s pink morning drinks us,
holding open the heart’s door to bloom
and blossom. Can you hear it—
that echo from me to you?
From some unknown spruce,
the great horned owl opines.
—for Sam Skold
—
Poet, memoirist, and translator, Rajiv Mohabir is the author of four books of poetry including Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021) which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur. His poetry and nonfiction have been finalists for the 2022 PEN/America Open Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and in Nonfiction, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction, and both second place and finalist for the Guyana Prize for Literature in 2022 (poetry and memoir respectively). His translations have won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the American Academy of Poets in 2020. Whale Aria (Four Way Books 2023) is his fourth collection of poetry and currently he is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Colorado Boulder.