It came to me that I needed a valley.
It came to me that I was done with the salmon
as my totem, how it scrapes its way upward over rocks,
how the body quivers and strains, as if waiting
to be touched for the first time. All that is fine
for thirty, even forty, but for two years now I’ve believed
in fifty, someplace where who I am counts for more
than who I might become. Last week at long last,
I found a valley where I could be the small thing
for once. I could lie down in the hot springs and just be
covered. I swayed there in the water and waited
for the calm that becomes a body of fifty.
It came to me how to be at home on my back,
my genitals floating above me, an obscure species
of water lily drifting back and forth,
hardly attached to the long and clumsy root
of the body. Soothed and silenced by water, it was here
that my life has brought me, wrinkled as the day I was born.
This time around I was calmer, more sure
of how water and earth work together to offer me up
to the valley. As if I were a human sacrifice,
given up in the name of love, baptized in water, flesh
and blood in the valley of stone until the last breath.