Jake Skeets

Blue Bark

wasps formed
in a dawn elsewhere
from bird or water lands
where pine primordial
where topsoil cribbed
mud black mornings
its first skies
more blue bark
an everlasting body
against the brush
from it appeared
the first beetles
and a grazing mist
burned against
cedar water
the brush
a lesser yellow
all stick and shell
abalone or corn seed
dry sung
another shell appeared
and another
another

 

Where Do Wild Horses Live


Not near canyons or slaughterhouses
Not at the salt lick
Interstate highways
Not deer
Not elk
Not erosion or overgrazing
Not wild elsewhere
Sheep in the valley
                        Nor any waters


From Autumn

I wonder the language of light on a morning walk in what feels like the desert
willow of winter; ash — flow — bellow tuff — velvet mesquite : The mountain in the
distance the color of the world. Wind in the language of sky, heard through
sentences, through tumbleweeds :
What is water if not the sky looking at itself?
                                                                              A warbler sees itself in me, in my
throat, or am I just the trick of light; ran rampant through a whisper of river?
Something made alive by voice? : But what is voice if not wind?
a low lake – collide – joy
wit – wing – joy
Another long morning
And now let me explain in Navajo: The moon is a penny. I carry with me an
empty notebook meant for the coming clouds; the pages held between the breaths
of the silver I feel choked and collapsed when I walk on damp wood chips and
frozen mud. I walk between two houses in favor of the other; and by the time I
reach one

it’s near noon

and there’s a rabbit cloaked in sawdust
murmuring through a snowy field

not a bird in the sky

Only the face of memory:
All the colors of every single morning

Coming Across a Horntoad

when I saw a horntoad
watch wildfire from juniper
its eyes mattered pitch
and smoldered open

its name sounds like small blood
a room full of breathing
a fire-caught voice
be holy somewhere

it leaves horizon suddenly
mountain carried into tongue
its memory: vein, dusk, bone spur 
its moon trail touch lit

another cathedral
another paint coat cracking
another
another

it has a tin can for sky
settled in open prism
a prism between storm
platelets and a god

I see still clouds
over valley dirt afternoons
in December when evening
turns a dark shore

everything tall
through the pinions
I take note because
it comes back

comes lunar
because ash altered
in spilled morning
because blooms,

a white tree, rope soot,
a river’s winded teeth
placid silver
and ankle deep

under another holy sky
of black dirt
I hear the morning
shell blue

And there a horntoad
its skin, its flat time,
its spine an arrowhead
pollen

sleet rain
it sings
mouthing a prayer
be holy somewhere

photo: Bear Guerra

Jake Skeets is the author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series, American Book Award, Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Whiting Award. He is from the Navajo Nation and teaches at the University of Oklahoma.

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