Thought It Could

It’s dark there, down in the draw
Where the dry wash waits for floods
That will flash when the snow melts,

Full of rocks, trees, mud, a corpse
Or two, and then back to sand,
A few flies in mud-caked roots,

A bit of trash like a flag
Hung from a snapped branch. You can’t
See it from where you are now

On slopes of black sticks in snow,
But it’s there—gash in the hill,
Not that deep yet, what wet scored

And will score when all this goes.
Where do you go in this world?
Where do you fall? Squibs of light,

Dust that got too close to us
From chunks of ice that will fall
To the sun that we spin round,

That spins round on the long arm
Of this dark-eyed patch of stars,
That fall in or fall out, out

To the next patch, next dense gap,
That will fall in its own mass
Or in the arms of more mass

And, at the last, burst, jet, leap,
A black pit spit though the night,
A wave that shakes stars too far

To fall for it, shakes loose dust
That may spray out through light years,
Some of it snagged, at the last,

By our sun, bits of which, then,
When swung too close to this rock,
Shoot squibs of light in the night

That might have some life in them,
That might seed a few high clouds
With far more life in their ice,

Just break down, and this snow falls
And then sits for the spring thaws,
When it will rush down the slope

As if it could have the thought
It could fall down to the core.
It won’t. It will carve the draw.