…his snore to keep

Morning in my arms
when he gives
himself utterly
to the unselfconscious
proboscis of sleep,
and breath catches
deep in the center
of his innocence,
contentment makes
of me the lord
of a shoreless sea.

2015

Road Rage

Under a tipping moon
a road of decomposed granite
no one ever drove
woke sweating from a nightmare
of fast food and pavement.
Its twisted ponderosas
and shallow rooted firs
became mountain chalets
and firewood. Tires!
it growled, and begged the rain
to sharpen its teeth.

2015

In the Graveyard of my Body

In the graveyard of my body,
I bury the bean of my sister.
Sometimes she’s a cherry.
Peach pit. Cilantro seed.
She branches new from
Vine or trunk or stem
Bearing white petals
Around a black eye
Or lemon fruit or
Giant butter beans
I stew with ham
In which I dip corn bread
To stuff my mouth
With my favorite love song
Sopping wet and simple.

Other times she is mica,
Flecked stone full of mirrors,
The bone carved owl
In her Illinois grave,
A house sparrow egg
Thrown from the nest.
Fools gold pours
From my heart while I sleep.
A dark duo of whos
Measure the distance.
See the drab bird alone, flitting?
Watch her build a nest up high.
Some feathered thing disappears
Into cirrus like a bean stalk
I’m not afraid to climb.

2015

The Carousel of Happiness

Today a llama in ballet slippers
Drives you to your children’s lost childhood.
Round and round and up and down
On that which can never be regained:
A brass axis you hold with both hands.
Strangely happy, someone else’s joy
Moves through your chest and chokes you.
You never asked for a perfect childhood.
The Vietnam vet who lovingly carved the animals
Of your life did not know you. Still, he knows you.
Nostalgia makes you stare at the ceiling,
Notice fairies on window sills, pretend fascination
At the simple machine of the thing in order
Not to cry. Pretending makes the fascination real,
Circling what never was and cannot be.
Soon you are stuck half in and out of a wall
Called Somewhere Else. You try another animal.
Another. Another. The rooster in pearls is silent.
The frog holding a rubber ball never throws it.
The pink pig doesn’t oink as you oink
At the little girl on the cat who insisted
We each choose the animal we want,
Not the animals closest to each other.
Proximity is not the highest goal in family life.
She knows. We can always wave and smile
Across the hub and spokes of hardwood timbers,
Probably once a private wood protected
By a sign that read No Trespassing.
Now it only costs a dollar to waltz
With the Wurlitzer military band organ,
Circling someone else’s Americana dream
That now is yours, two childhoods late.

2015
Nederland, CO

Garden Confessions

1.
I confess I wasn’t happy to find chickens
in the green beans, leisurely pecking the fruits
of our labor. But surely beans are tastier
than grass, and truly, if Speckled Sussex
eat the beans, and we fry the eggs,
we still get the beans. Better the chickens
and us than damn grasshoppers,
who, I confess, make me anxious
until the chickens eat them,
snatching them from air mid-leap.
So let the chickens in the garden.
Guard the eggplant. Nasturtiums
don’t deter pests as well as beaks.

2.
I must confess: I am a green witch, digging
with fingernails in compost, my silver rings
caked with brown black muck of tomatoes
underbaked with chicken shit in the compost pile.
Motherwort and purple coneflower don’t care;
Calendula eats any rotten thing.
I confess I wonder if some childless Irish mother
perhaps planting seeds to resurrect her child,
once studied granite stones in garden holes she dug.
I wonder if, come mid July, she bent to touch
each perfect plant, sing it a small cicada song,
caress its waxy, tiny or stinging leaves
and walked away, smelling her fingers.

2015

Once upon a Kitchen

Sick in bed, nose full and sore,
I watch him move through
the kitchen. (Every bedroom
door should look upon a kitchen).
Meadowlarks chime through walls.
Windows take his silhouette.
His head bows to morning tasks.
A blender roars. Bottles clink.
Water pours its song over dishes.
He sits by me on the bed
to drink his banana coconut
smoothie. I sip hot tea.
Our eyes exchange soft shining.

2015

Sisters Left

Somehow we laugh.
Of three,
we are the two
sisters left.
Our long curls ring
our mother’s grief,
Christmas-bent
on bruising blue
her knees.
We pray to last.

2015
for Kimmi

Unless I Still

I’m always leaving even as I stay,
I told March wind, mercilessly
Tugging clothes’ loose ends,
Blinding me with hair.

It circled my clenched spine,
Made knees bend and bounce
Impatiently before it said,

The flag of who you think you are
Is always flapping and snapping
Against a dream of some better place.

You are like a dead leaf rattling
On a spring tree, unable to let go
Even while buds are breaking green.

If you let go, this place will fly;
If you hold on, deeper root.
Either way, the chill wind breathed,
You’re mine.

2015

Walking the Pasture

The night we walked
the two-pathed road—the one
you accidentally carved
in the pasture driving buckets
of corn and water drawn warm
from our winter bathtub
back and forth to three pigs
who skip and snort every time
your silver pickup climbs
the gentle hill and stops—
the farm light, as always, took over
where the moon left off.
Clouds crept in from the east.
We smelled but doubted rain.
We smiled but doubted this, our place.
Orion, in his simplicity,
pinpoints of restlessness shining,
hunted the western horizon
without finding it, shoulders lit,
chest filled with night.

2015

The Cross

When enough people die or begin
their descent in January,
walking a dark highway
into other people’s heaven,
or drinking childhood pain
to ashes, it’s enough to break
any woman of poetry.
I grow tired of pouring
my body into words.
It’s embarrassing. Absurd
to think they could hold me
like four urns on a funeral table
that will drive in four directions,
my flesh finally the cross without
the dead Christ metaphor.

2015