Once, I passed a teepee on the highway
but I didn’t know anything. Then you wrote
to me that you lived the Navajo life for
two weeks. How you were witness to night catching the scent of the stars in its palm,
so it’s just you, the fire, and a billion pinhole apertures expanding across the noiseless inheritance. How mothers and their daughters
and their grandmothers weave their own patterning dreams and rugs from the sky so they can sleep among their ancestors.

You told me how they have words for everything
we don’t and the children play in the dusty light that turns
dark pink. How bus rides with strangers are worth
eight hours because the mountain views are prodigious
but not ambitious and there is never an opportunity
for you to sigh and think what am I doing here because
home isn’t something you question or consciously search
for, home finds you when it peeks out from the pockets
of nopales and red rocks to hum with the deep wind, when
it lulls you to sleep at night with ease, when it fills all the space between your bones and soul that you didn’t know existed.