Instructions for Building Straw Huts

First you must have unbelievable faith in water, in women dancing like hands playing harps for straw to grow stalks of fire. You must understand the year that begins with your hands tied behind your back, worship of dark totems weighed down with night birds that shift their weight & leave holes in the sky. You must know what’s behind the shadow of a treadmill— its window the moon’s reflection & silent season reaching into red sunlight hills. You must know the hard science of building walls that sway with summer storms. Locking arms to a frame of air, frame of oak rooted to ancient ground where the door’s constructed last, just wide enough for two lovers to enter on hands & knees. You must dance the weaverbird’s song for mending water & light with straw, earth, mind, bright loom of grain untortured by bushels of thorns.