If you took a wash of gold into your mouth
and spat, out would slip the Bighorn Mountains,
their kuriltai of rams, turbid elk shifts
bleared as sieves through the haze off the rapids,
spindrifts kicked up by their paddling
hooves and caught and then shook from their beards.
These hit the breeze and whip up to our lips
that we lick and taste milkweed and bark and
metallics. Your palm takes my waist as we watch
the elk throttle onto the woad-blue shore.
Shoulders of rain spindle in from the east
like a herd of wheels. The sun’s panners
respool and withdraw to the western caves.
You have no likeness, not in their flanks glassed
with water, not in the hot chest of earth,
which shivers its bribes into the river and catches
in the rams’ heels and the hares’ fur, and purrs there
toward us. Slaughterer of onslaughts, you tent us
beneath a slick wink of canvas and the rain comes.
—
Erin L. McCoy’s poetry collection, Wrecks, is forthcoming from Noemi Press. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Conjunctions, and other publications. Her work has been selected for the Best New Poets anthology twice, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize. Her website is erinlmccoy.com.
