Hived lung, yellow and tangled with blue air. At the office of synchronized bowers, she charges up the dirt stair and vanishes into the promising veil of brightness. Reflection studded sky, greening and pitted with green weeds; the green-eyed hills carved into an unburnt hearth, purple with cold. She wanders in gladness, picks along the rinsed-rock ridge, curls into the heat of bleached summit, the blood warming in its tunnels, the ice cracking underfoot. Now she emerges from the breath-hot cloud, perhaps, into sharp air thinned like a row of seedlings. Passes beneath the stiff wing of a white fir, or beneath the shadowed ripple of a bird, flinching in the skeletal air. Once I whitened the hides of animals with a blue soap, a prism trick. Once the crowded cattle pressed their hooves into the purple-black muck, and slept dreamless and musky with each others heat. In the slippery grooves of the chest another sleep ratchets closer, yellow with significance, clouded with ash.