The Amon Liner Poetry Award IN THE HUMMINGBIRD EXHIBIT AT THE ARIZONA-SONORA DESERT MUSEUM

A green bird hovers above red rock
and disappears into a thicket of ocotillo.

Dashes of color flit around our heads,
dive between branches, rise
to the netted ceiling, scatter

like flecks of paint: blue topaz,
magenta, tangerine.

You grab my shoulder and point
to the cactus beside us—Remember
that one, Kate? Jumping cholla.

My ankle like a spiked bat
in your lap as you pulled the two-inch
spindles from my flesh.

How could I forget? It only takes one time
to learn what not to touch in the desert—

seat-belt buckles, the horned toad,
the blood that shot from its eyes
when I brought it in the house.

Your hand still gripping my shoulder,
the words I knew would come spill
softly from your mouth: diagnosis,

prognosis, atrophy, months. There are tears
in your blue eyes, and my whole body
feels far away, trapped under rock.

You take my sun-warmed hands in yours.
We watch the birds, the fierce choreography

of their rituals, until it’s time to pass
back through the curtain of long rubber slats,
the antechamber and two sets of doors

that keep them inside. As I help you
to your feet, a sliver of purple lands
on your shoulder, decides you’re its flower

for a moment, then shudders from sight—
a piece of dust blown from a band of light.

I read that if a hummingbird lingers
near, it brings with it the power to achieve
something impossible. But when

a sliver of sunlight kisses
the wrinkles of your neck, tickles
your skin with the tips of its wings,

what does that mean? The ruby-throated bird
lifts from the cotton of your shirt, floats

as close as it can get to the sky,
and I wonder where it would go,
what it would do in the world

if it could. Drink chuparosa in Oaxaca?
Steal thread from a red skirt drying on the line?

When the sun staggers behind the Catalinas,
the hummingbirds hold their breath.

The Robert Watson Literary Prize Poem from THE BOOK OF REVELATION

The first child arrived
as through the oiled doorway of the sea

then came the purple dark closing time
the world a sea of insects
rolling on a waterbed into oblivion

Now that I am a mother
I almost never dream

but when I do
I’m sorry

I dream of apocalypse

The first word of Book of Revelation
is apokalypsis
meaning unveiling

man digging into the velvet sack
of the ocean floor—

revealing its labyrinth of bleached coral
divesting the wrecks—

or how at the nursery my son chooses
two kinds of hyacinth to plant

and appraises them daily
until the blooms finally appear

then narrows his eyes
and pushes the flower
into his mouth

his sister laughing
running down the sidewalk
away from us

A child can get sick
on sweet things

and with that tongue
start talking

like a king

BRIEF EDEN

For part of one strange year we lived
in a small house at the edge of a wood.
No neighbors, which suited us. Nobody
to ask questions. Except
for the one big question we went on
asking ourselves.
                                 That spring
myriads of birds stopped over
briefly. Birds we’d never seen before, drawn
to our leafy quiet and our brook and because,
as we later learned, the place lay beneath
a flyway. Flocks appeared overnight—birds
brilliant or dull, with sharp beaks
or crossed bills, birds small
and enormous, all of them pausing
to gorge at the feeder, to rest their wings,
and disappear. Each flock seemed surer than we
of a destination. By the time we’d watched them
wing north in spring, then make
an anxious autumn return,
we too had pulled it together and we too moved
into what seemed to be our lives.