At the foot of the dryfall, bleedmining scattered output from Darwin’s Wash.

Rootfine fractures in quartz lead through timedeep coursing.

I close my eyes. Hold the bristling wedgecrest against the tablerock,

feel the soothe—soft druse,

feel the millionmillion crystals pitting my fingernail.

I key for hardness. Test the depression. Starting with halfweight,

the sliced thin facets of the bushblack gem ... Wanting what?

Hardness timed?

The narrow gorge in the back of the stone-being, less open? open to less?

2.

I spit-taste the desert riches. Fill the cleavage, eyes closed.

Under the dryfall, slide her calcite protrusion

ear-to-ear, now across my lids—

I catch her up, palm to palm, tongue, turn; breath-scald the parallel

creases until the break—softness—leaks

Agate Black—color intensities, something I crave. The crystal

parts, wettest—dripping fox hound’s-tongue—

on the ringfinger, mounted in everyday silver.

Her forefolds a unity of kin-sweat, if rubbed.

3.

I liquor-up her forefolds—kin-sweat—a Darwinian unit. If rubbed,

mirrored luster on the window—twinned—cups through my own body.

I’m wet light backed up inside the canyon, caught to the bone

aflash in the paneglass—no vestige of an origin no sign

whatever of

an end

4.

Having no other by-name for the sunlong day on glass plate to go by,

I scour her licorice odor into my ringfinger.

Let wildness gash awhile.

Lay crude over the crystal cavity, awhile.

by Catherine Webster, from The Thicket Daybreak, forthcoming from the Center for Literary Publishing, distributed by university press of Colorado, Fort Collins.