December (2011)

At the end of the year
trees, stripped, rattle
My breath, when it comes,
rattles
Bones can splinter

Out in the wild,
eyes slits in the wind,
I walk thick
ropy tree roots
over cold rivers
The white sun
floods stone forests
I eat handfuls of red berries,
burst veins and slurp
old blood
  
Still I am asleep to God
  
Nights
the moon is no mother
The stars shrink back

I fear sleep more than death

Last day on the farm

Took a knife to the spinach
Hatchet to the neck
Five headless roosters hung
by their feet from the syrup shed

In the long night before
my first day here
I cut off all my hair

Naked, I began to live

The center

12.11.12

We were alone at the center of the night.
The lake was ice
ten inches thick
and when you put your foot down
to test, it gurgled and moaned.

It was not the kind of alone I was used to,
me in my one body, or the absolute
refuge beyond that,
the way you lay down on the concrete,
cupped your hands around your eyes
and stared up at the one color
there was. 

Try this, you said, it's like you're right there,
and the night widened for miles around us.

Gill-over-the-ground

11.27.12

I'm trying to say this
with my hands, just my hands.

Someone falls asleep
every night in the place where we've both made
the same mistake

and the snow at night comes through
my windows and blinds
and freezes me into one being.

There are many pieces by now;

I keep tripping and breaking
my fall with my heart.

Put a name on my red skin and my raised
skin and my pale skin and even green-
can you cure something with no name?

Skin comes apart and doesn't come back together.
New skin grows.

It's the end of November.
I find a tiny blue flower under plastic in the kale patch,
pick it, and realize how long it might be
until I see another.

The list

10.22.12

The short day.
The headache,
the trembling muscle,
the tickle at the back of the throat.
The old blond dog scrabbling
at the deck.  The struggle to stand.
The darkest, wettest leaves
slicked paper-thin to the ground
on the darkest, coldest night
yet.  The year is fast.
The woodsmoke swirls
down the road.
The best crop rots in the field.
The good kiss feels bad.
The dreams linger,
the dreams haunt.
The dreams scurry their nervous truths
through the long night.
Through the short day.
Far out in the woods
on another long walk I'm too tired to take.
I don't want to sleep.
I don't want to go home.  
The geese call at night
and the dark becomes three-dimensional.
In the eye of the storm,
in bed, where the terrible
deserts of lost mother and body
knock together like blinds in the wind,
but no wind.  The room is closed.
I cannot stay here.

Wind

9.19.12

First night in the new world.
Outside,
a good storm.
Where are you?
Wind.  A place
called wind,
the most honest place
in the universe, where people
sing songs to wake up
the people they love.
There are no alarm clocks,
just loving people, and poems
about blackberries,
and a steady wind through wind
that clears disease.
The first person I ever loved
lives here.  And I wave
to her in the windy street -
all the streets are cobblestone -
and at meals I set a place for her
like I did when I was a child. 
Wind has no children.
And so no guilt. 
When someone dies,
they are wind-swept
away
in a grand funeral of tears
and bonfire, and there are no hospital beds
with broken rails, no leftover morphine bottles.
There are wildflowers, goldenrod this time of year,
and joe-pye weed, and bone-set,
a wild feast, hen-of-the-woods,
sweet cicely and acorn flour cakes,
and no one regrets
knowing the dead. 
Good;
I know
so many.

Creation

7.25.12

Once,
Bryan explains,
words had the power to manipulate form
directly.

We're in the field.  Early
late blight in the tomatoes.
Eight-foot-tall bean trellis
collapsed halfway down the row.

Most life doesn't speak
in words.
Only humans.

Swallowtails levitate
and land on clover flowers.
Milkweed pods
swollen as mangoes.

Strange growing
season.

I spoke and began to exist.
Now I am human.
No matter what

I lose in the process.

No matter how actual
or imagined
this power
is.

Beach house

6.27.12

salt light through the window

hurts this morning

far from your body, you reach
for mine

delicate as the obvious paper lantern
metaphor I gave you for your 19th

between thin walls, the rush

of fast waves on the shore