Having once learned that
when a language dies
six butterflies disappear
from the consciousness of the earth,
I've tried to preserve the language of our summer.

breath—
The dull, infrequent pulse of Austin hill country.
The flutter of your tangling hair in the earth's exhale.
A quick mid-morning calm.
Mount Bonnel's awed intake of your voice
escaping its graffiti cliffs
down the Colorado River.

voice—
The forest, turning its attention from the river to our exchange.
The ambition of a starved squirrel, half-materialized from its adjacent hollow.
Time's hourglass carving up the burn of afternoon.
The messenger of my one-hundred rehearsed memories,
revising themselves in quest for laughter.

laugh—
The echo of four-hundred mockingbirds fraternizing with the treetops.
The confused sway of four-hundred pine trees against four p.m. rain clouds.
The chatter of four-hundred staggered raindrops
meeting four minutes of our apathetic skin.
The brush of four-hundred pine needles, as I roll into your embrace.

kiss—
The answer to a moment's distraction—
the moment, your reading of Nabokov's Butterflies;
the distraction, the non-correlation between your lips
and butterflies.
The Colorado River moving against our stillness.
The destruction of a thousand landscape paintings
as the day implodes in perfection's black hole.
The conjunction of sun and earth so spectacular
that memory and wish die of silence.

whisper—
The slow stars of a hesitant horizon.
A violet horizon's ten-thousand riverbats
awaking in an unknown world.
The apology of the indefinite moment
exposing at least one butterfly
I no longer remember.