Anyone who has stood in a famous landscape and felt faintly let down will recognise the poem's opening move. "I've been to the desert southwest, / I know how it's pictured, & I swear / this is that light." The speaker talks like someone settling an argument, with a plain, slightly cocky voice and an oath. What follows is a case for the nearby over the faraway. The "blood-drenched gold" that "sun-starved souls" cross the continent to find is, the speaker claims, arriving at dawn over an ordinary Eastern woodland. The birds named later (Carolina wren, white-throated sparrow, pileated woodpecker) and words like "cove" and "ridgeside" suggest hilly, wooded country, though the poem never names its place.
The title adds a layer, by inference. Cibola is a name tied in history to legends of golden cities in the Southwest, so it fits the poem's argument that the real gold can be found at home. The subtitle "Beginnings (cont'd)" suggests this is one piece of a longer sequence, which may explain why the poem starts mid-conversation.
The middle of the poem turns on a gambling metaphor. While the speaker stands "down below / in the shadow," the dooryard birds are "wagering every note they have." The woodpecker then turns the whole cove into "a resonator," its drumming "a fast rattle of dice on the bone of / a locust." The image works because it is both exact and surprising. Woodpecker drumming does sound like rattling, and calling a dead tree "bone" makes the forest a kind of skeleton being played. The birds are also gamblers, putting everything on one throw, which gives the dawn chorus real stakes. The long list of species, run together with commas and closed by an ampersand, feels crowded and breathless, much like the noise itself. Even the line breaks join in, splitting "Carolina / wren" across two lines as if the bird were hopping from one perch to the next.
Then the poem moves from watching to dissolving. As "the light spreads," the speaker begins to see "roots from underground, shining / tips of feathers." The senses stretch past what is possible. The speaker can "hear what shrews / are up to in their tunnels" and picture newborn bears "blindly sucking the blue milk / of a huge & dreamless sleep." The body becomes part of the landscape. The "blue down here" is a "spreading of rhizomes / under my skin," so the veins become a root system, "globe-encircling" and "feathery / like the feelers of a night-flying moth." Plant, animal and human anatomy share one network.
The poem's colour scheme shifts to match. It begins in gold, the light of the Southwest and of legend, but it ends in blue. Blue is the "ordinary horizon," the colour of veins, of milk, and finally of the speaker's own wood smoke, "oak & cherry," rising and then "running along the ground." Gold belongs to the spectacle, while blue belongs to the speaker's own body and home. The poem gives up the dazzling colour for the intimate one, and it seems to prefer the trade.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its long sentences spill over line endings, and its dashes and ampersands give it a jotted, notebook-like speed. The sounds still do some quiet work. "Sun-starved souls" hisses with envy, and "blindly sucking the blue milk" has a soft, drowsy bunching of b's and l's. The last line, "blue, blue . . .", trails off into an ellipsis, as if the smoke and the speaker's attention were thinning into the air.
The poem matters because it treats attention as a kind of travel. It doesn't sneer at the desert, since the speaker has been there and trusts the picture. It simply insists that the gold was never exclusive to one place. If you are quiet and awake enough at dawn, your own dooryard can bring you to the edge of the same wonder, and perhaps a little further, down among the roots and the sleeping bears.