Dogerrel in Dark Times

Living in a mountain paradise,

An hour out from the possible presence of ICE,

I take daily tinctures of vice to stay awake—fuck it: woke.

This morning’s dose: Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks—

Acrid, choked drops under the tongue

To inoculate myself from the plague

I inhaled in a crowd of gentle, well-meaning robots

(Not fair, perhaps, are you?) leaning in, cheering on white poets

Who swore to us in wide gesture and easy rhyme

That joy under the moon is resistance in dark times

Which I suspect is only true

If you are black, brown, LGBTQ or chronic-blue.

It Could be Otherwise

It is this.

This waking in the warmth of us,

his brown shoulder ever

my western mountain

inching slowly, as mountains do

toward me. I am no valley.

The long cloud of my arm

drapes along his gentle slope

a promise of weather.

The silence holds us

as it holds everything,

preferring not one thing

over another.

with a grateful nod to Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise”

Giant Hand

Muscular cottonwoods dwindle to tips

reaching for light, tight buds refuse

the ways of roots mirrored below.

They plan to open a thousand eyes while I

spread out blindly underground, white,

thirsty, unaware of the entire structure

spanning over me—a giant hand built

by my dark wandering, begging for water.

Wasted Blessings

In early March’s greenhouse

I tear up moss beds with bare hands

toss them into compost

along with perfectly edible beet greens

in their second or third season

with surprising small beets stacked

at the base of their stalks

like merry-go-round ponies on poles

rising above the woody mother root

hard and mottled as this grandmother’s fist

marbled inside like an old tree knot

white and red-grained

my shame forgiven ten minutes later

by a mother deer, queen

of the compost heap, who

startled and startling me

munched with her fawns

on blessings I thought

I’d wasted

Four Hands

One summer, broke, young mothers,

newly single, she and I massaged

lonely married men. Most washed.

Wearing only his ring, Starved, he said,

one even cried. Tell her, we said,

four hands crisscrossing the cross of him.

Others laid their tiny golden yokes

on the table, bedside.

Begged for more.

We are mothers, we said. You could

be the law. When the soundtrack of

The Last Temptation of Christ finally stopped,

zipped up, ripped off,

each man thought,

where is my happy ending.

His Lines

Phone light dances across the panes

of his small, rectangular black-framed glasses.

With my eye I draw the shape of his hand becoming a wrist,

forearm becoming a bicep, shoulder, inclined neck

like a hungry ant crawling the line he makes against space,

pressed upon the world, no pencil in hand.

A young artist once, I realized that to simply perceive

line and value—light, penumbra, shadow—

is as rewarding as creating them on paper, on canvas.

I vowed to live my life like that: no patron, no place

needed to store large, lonely Modern paintings,

or cardboard sleeves to stash charcoal sketches, yellowing.

Here I am now, in my 50s, unknown but knowing.

My own lines softened, blending. So be it.

“What do you want to do,” he asks.

“Stare at you watching your phone,” I say and ask,

“What do you want to doooooo,” flubbing my finger

over my lips on the oooooo like two fleshy, silly guitar strings,

my mouth the sound hole.

He grins, “Now I don’t know, since you asked it like that.

Anything is possible.”

For Dorell on our 13th Valentine’s Day

Why Not Tell Myself I’m on Vacation?

Why not tell myself I’m on vacation?

Look at the blue mountain there, the peach sunrise       

behind it while I stretch, hands prickling with cold.

I live here, sure, and work hard, but to say I’m on vacation

sharpens my eyes, softens my heart toward this day,

wondering what novelty of beauty or kindness

I’ll find in the people I meet, as if joy is dormant

beneath the mundane surface of every single thing.

Felt Heart

It is easy. Gather

colorful puffs of wool. Roll

them into hints of shapes—

one large asymmetric lump

and several tubes—hold

these fiber springs against

a foam brick, stab

them into hardness

with a notched needle. Lay

the forms upon each other, prick

for six hours until they

stick together, resemble

your heart, complete

with ventricles and atria.

You are not through. Tattoo

in twisted wool thread forked arteries in red

over blue veins upon the tiny fist

of fuzzy muscle, one that could pump

wool blood

through a wool being built by gods—

your own hands and heart—

against the cold world.

But who has time for that?

Only wool women with wool wombs.

Stop with the precious heart, its hacked tubes,

disembodied totem in your wrinkled palm.

Promise yourself to love like this

feather light, wounded and beautiful.

It just happens

Leaves relax into winter work of becoming mud

in the driveways and guttered curbs of Portland.

They even cast themselves as chemical prints—

countless, urban concrete shrouds of Turin,

their palms shadowed points of dark reminiscence.

He falls in love with the city’s tannic smudge

like faces found in charcoal scrawl beneath his thumb,

eyes shocked wide on the stained page, unblinking,

reflecting any pinpoint of light the city permits,

accommodating, elevating every gutsy Gethsemane.

Immaculate Conception

They made the manger birth about Jesus,

not Mary—archetype of every mother’s secret hope,

our silent prayer, studying the silken face and limbs

of sons whom, we know, fueled by our milk

and poverty, will save the world of awful men from

themselves, having filled us countless times with unwelcome

seed, fabricated a fantastic tale of God coming

in the form of a dove (swan, eagle, bull, ram, rain)

into her. It is not a woman’s story. It is a man’s

ruse. Immaculate conception. You and I both know—

had she told the truth, men would not have believed her,

would have blamed her, or made a miracle of it, of her, child

as she was, cradling their newborn hero against her heart.