In areas, yes,
old surprise
cottonwoods rich with beetle-secrecy,
where the creek intermits, continues,
slowing to muddy cienega, bright
algae resealing over each salient plunge,

(toad that doesn't isn't seen,
and neither toad that did)

then, before springing again,
seeps underground a while
through the theatre all canopy,

or in other news, in
a second life a hundred
feet higher than its earthen

preface, in a wave twice
an hour six weeks steady:
cicada song.

Three guitarists here wouldn't
hear themselves emerge from it
strumming still.

What runs under us
and what transfers trees above—
instead, let it
embarrass our walk
past the boys like us expecting siege
on five ATVs: okay, togetherness.

The meantime expanse around, all that
Sonoran rubble run down from
constant mountains, against all that
always
the sometimes place, togetherness
withal, our riparian area: where
groundwater runs high and the creek
thirsty enough to orchestrate
even a willow against other
precarity.

Back in the jeep
in the news Josh tells
the canyon's rumor of a jaguar
is triple-sourced in surveillances:
Game and Fish, the University,
and (tender footage) Homeland Security.

A lone male spotted
sipping, for instance, at the apron
of the ballroom-black process
pour:
a mining outfit's
alpha test for its open pit.
The smelter drew, and
ballroom-large, the practice
slathered obsidian the level overlook.

The promontory is risk
and power, both, for this
lonesome monitor roaming, his venture
careful under new moon even. Tonight

too, Kimi showed me, where by
day I watched those blotted, jointed ants
black as the miners' manufacture
make transacting industry
across the metal slate, a talis snail

erects her long, slender, independent eyes,
erects and twists her eyes to see
whatever predator encroaches on her cautious,
molten-slow, muscular and focal equally,
urgent retreat
in retrospect.