Embarkation

One year, in the dark, a man thanked a woman for a night. Earlier, below a glowing orange window he had called her over to his side of the table to share, when he reached for the shred of carrot on her blouse, when his eyes shone with father grief, when he nodded to her awful confessions and, later, didn’t order tea, she felt the swell, the choice arise. She chose. An ancient song slipped their bodies over its head like skin, or ocean foam, a low crescendo. It was a song of saving, the body of a major third. Can two people save each other from the ravages of selfhood? Escape? Who carries whom in love’s concert? The song offered itself. A possible ship, an embarkation.

2014

Volunteers

Light revolves us; we have circled
Hidden suns circling a larger one
Back to this beginning place.
Can it already be our first day?

For you, I pulled back thick curtains
On shame-lights making lace of me.
In my lonely white-rooted darkness,
You touched the lace and dreamed.

Limping, porous too, you packed that house.
We buried labeled boxes in the earth.
Homeless, we became a little mountain,
A long drive, fire and water, couriers.

Now a wide plain, we meadowlark the sky.
My old perennials root some other lawn:
That once-bed of my children’s paradise,
That hard packed marriage and divorce,

Sweet garden of my lonely manhood! Once a girl,
Rilke knew that sky-wrought solitude,
The oneness of austere androgyny. I cried too.
But from him I depart that mystic heroism.

I am no manly woman, you, no woman-man
Nor Rilke’s mirror, but tilled space, broken large.
Here shines not the dupe but multiplicity of our hearts,
Cast in cosmic arcs, sour manure where we grow.

My love, this has been a year of sprouting up.
Our new bed resolves the soil. Love springs
Through what wilted yellow-dry, now mulch.
Some volunteers we keep, some, plough.

The old barn fell for light to fall again on ground.
Forgotten beds untilled for years: they give.
The earth slow turns, and we are turning earth.
Seeds in hand, the garden waits, roughed in.

2014

To Unbloom

Lute-sown
Seed too deep to root
Too raw
To be exhumed
Waits for promise
To unbloom
While overhead
A garden swoons.

2014

Man in the Moon

The full moon
Doesn’t ponder
Unpaid bills.

It is no silver dollar,
heavy breast or milk.
Its halo is no silver ring.

Likewise, it is no tumor,
empty pocket,
Zeus’ oculus.

No wish fulfilling jewel,
It doesn’t shrink in poverty
Or play the lottery.

We do.

2014

once his heart

once his heart
was her nest
they murmured
like corn
over broken barn
answers born
in mud and sky
for river light
and quiet cows

2014

How a Book Becomes Lascaux

Mistaken for words,
I am pictures of sound,
and sound— pictures of talking flesh.
I break from the hand.

From ochre spit
to scribbled script to screen, sans serif
Ariel usurping time’s new Roman,
black curled, looped and deaf.

However drawn, my pages get inside,
paint worlds on your rough walls.
If someone lit a fire in you,
prehistory would revolve.

2014

Mirror, Mirror

I don’t know what frames me
Or how I lean.

I can’t see myself.

When you look at me,
you see only you.

If you want the truth,
look at me.

Can you say what force contains me?
I will tell you what I see.

You in the room wearing red,
White scarf, blue jeans, black vest.

You have a body this week.
You are pacing.

Glancing at air with friends.
No more. No less.

I don’t know what you are writing.

Whatever it is,
It is not about me.

2014

A Mile in Me

Skin of duality.
Empty dream of feet.
Pour your pair into me.

We’ll amble shores
Where bare soles tremble.
Black stone beach.

Cactus bloom gorge.
Waterproof vault
In a wet cemetery.

2014

Her Death

There was no lightning to announce
Her death, though her eyes shot wide
And clear into a sun we couldn’t see.
Freed from sight, she did not squint.

In unison our heads fell back, wailing
Like Picasso’s horse, having just lost
The quiet war. There was no exit sign
In the upper corner of the room.

Her name never flashed in lights
To celebrate the way she moved like water
Wheeling her IV, saint in a loosely tied sheet,
Old child playing a bare-assed ghost.

When she floated away, her body
A cold stone, we too were stones
Swallowed by a lost river
Rubbing us small and smooth.

2014

Barnyard Light the Professor

Please have your fingers prepared
To take notes in the dirt.
Even though the moon,
Sharper than I, distracts you,
Pretend to be writing.
Today we will discuss hyperbole.
Consider yourselves, crouched there
Like clocks. Your long darkness—
An arm counting eternity.

2014