Love Poem for a Friend

by ANNE HAVEN McDONNELL

But you could say that two people sitting at a kitchen table and talking about what matters pretty much makes up a church. That is what a church is, in one way or another. We have to believe that. 
—Ilya Kaminsky

The knobby spine of that mustang
holds the horizon like a hammock.
Behind her swayed back, the sky
burns apricot, filling into 
the day and my truck emptying
its tank towards Utah.
There are the frack wells framed
by the cup of that horse’s spine,
and soon there’s the great spine
of stone that runs along the river.
Another November, we park side by side,
pick a canyon from our perch, follow
deer prints in crypto, where the rain
goes down, we go. In a room of stone,
we sit and watch sunlight through
the membranes of a bat’s wings 
as she flits and darts for insects 
we can’t see, rising off tinajas.
Two people talking can be a church,
he said, and though he meant the war,
we let words rise from this
flood of silence, shake like my dog
does, head to tail, water spitting
off, shuddering herself new. 
Across a fire, the only light
that smears the stars, we sit 
in some earned peace of fifty years,
telling stories of old loves and our miraculous 
survival. Meet me here my dear,
both of us gorgeous, leafing out
lavishly in our spectrum of queer,
this tangle of slickrock canyons, unbuilt
for us. Two people not talking
can be a church, too.