Radha Marcum

OROGENY ORIGAMI  

San Rafael Swell, Utah  

1.  

Make a horizon of the page  

as if it were the light bare striated shoulders of desert  

under which fish-jaws gape in sediment over which  

purple wildflowers displace Anthropocene air—  

2.  

—crease fence and freight train mark distance make  

lonelinesses in the whole— break ancient lakebed coal  

into angles of repose  

for millennia  

3.  

—unfold and remake  

a slope with globe-mallow  

and primrose  

pincushion and pronghorn  

alert in the juxtaposition of wind-twisted juniper  

and coal plant  

billowing white before 

a dusk-purpled uplift  

a floorboard-gray mountain  

4.  

— double fold  

the jagged canyon line 

plunge-fold the red-black sorrow-streaked cliffs  

holding soft to air and talus above the shimmer curve of water  

that shapes the rock  

that shapes the breath rushing up for evening  

5.  

—tuck me into one star  

swallowed by dusk  

as if sky’s fabric folded  

a secret horizon in its sunset 

—Radha Marcum

MEADOWLARKS 

And finally there is love 

exiting the drunk earth at its muddy edges 

replete, repeating things, those ancient and invisible templates 

green and greener, then yellow and gray-winged 

voices from willow sticks or marshland fences calling and  

recalling 

song like a lance at the pressure of thought 

like sun angled through low cloud through windshields 

burning straight through the body itself. 

—Radha Marcum