The Barren Gilt

The woman will not explain away
her farm-fed fat
or forgetfulness. She is losing
more and more.
Not fat. There is genius
in forgetting.
No accolades. No profit.

The gilt was barren. Huge.
Soon to slaughter.

If enough space,
if enough
is made in the mind,

in the freezer,

poems don’t care
to be written.
Nor do her strong hands,
thinking Other
against her own fat, care.

The farmer said she went willingly.
No fuss but from the boar.

Something—what?—
remembers
belonging to another body.
No padding
under that once-skin.
She forgets. Goes willingly.

2015

Mowing

Lambsquarter, kochia and all their lanky friends
Rise up on the prairie inside our weathered fences
Like lush jungle or high rise apartments. It’s all scale.
Chickens cannot venture through, nor human feet.

Feral cats will brave the dive for rabbits
Or for our fat domestic cat with whom they share
Loose feline ties—unlikely friends. In games
Of hide and seek, they stand on hind legs, peer
Into the waving green, bat paws, prowl for mice
Like shadows of each other every night.

But I am singing for glorious weeds.
Their wordless philosophy filling space
Like old stories or fantasies fill the mind.
The time comes they must be mowed
To save ourselves from mosquitos who lie
In wait, shirtless, hanging out of windows,
Threatening passersby who raise their ire in clouds
With each thoughtful stop to squint at sky.

When the farmer’s sixteen-year-old son—
His country mullet curling from ball cap,
Its bleach blond ends tickling the breeze—
Drops off their Japanese riding mower,
Its wide girth and two arms bent with readiness,
I feel the thrill of machines. The thrill of men
Who make and lust for them, strange Galateas.

It takes awhile to remember the order—
Release the brake, then start? Or turn the key
And then release the brake. The latter brings a roar.
I slip on bruising headphones. Plastic, black, silent.
No music in these but my own voice amplified
With happy tuneless songs for weeds and speed.

I drop the blade, ride the thing in random patterns,
Pass back the opposite way against earlier grains
Of lain-down whiskers. Apologize to wildflowers.
Look up. Laugh at chickens who scramble to the coop
Like… well, like chickens, like tiny, fully-feathered
Velociraptors terrorizing 80s movies, only sillier.

I steer into shapes of fields like a vicious ship.
Weeds lie down under me with little resistance
Releasing swarms of homeless young grasshoppers
In waves. I worry for the garden, wonder if I should
Spare some weeds to lure the hoppers away
From mustard greens, arugula, tasty canopies
Where whole families of toads hunt and stare.

Before long, I’m done mowing the odd triangular plot
Between the henhouse and the hotwire
Bordering the pasture. Over my shoulder,
Chickens joyously dash into the newly opened space
To do their own mowing. My mind, too, is a range.

I park the machine, stretch and scan. Plan a walk
Through areas no longer lost. I am sweating,
Covered in fine grit and blown-back clippings
Spit by careless wind. When Dorell comes home
From the house he is framing, he kisses my neck,
Declares, “You smell like me.” Licks his lips, “Salt.”
And with that word and work, earth trying
To escape us, that is what we are.

2015

Soft Equations of State

IMG_8264

(This erasure/collage poem was written by deleting most of the words in the article, “Soft equations of state for neutron-star matter ruled out by EXO 0748-676,” written by Feryal Özel in Nature, 29 June 2006. The words in this poem were taken from their article in this exact order. No words not found in the article were added. I created the accompanying collage with images from several issues of Nature as well.)

The interior of stars matter.
That the early universe achieved
terrestrial matter appears to rule
out soft equations and unconfined
centres.

The radiation flux,
the stellar surface observed
from a single source is color,
temperature, expressions, yield—
the stellar parameters.

Tighten these constraints,
the slowly spinning stars,
rotational infinity, a fitting function.

The main uncertainty bursts,
dynamically unimportant flash.

Shown are the contours,
the black shaded area.

Uncertainties, uncertainties
limit the actual radius of the star.

Freefall, time scales!

Unknown binary system
affects the X.

I can obtain lower limits
as a strange star.

Only the stiffest equations of state
in a small orbit are negligible.

My method is a direct source,
a globular cluster.

The mass and radius of stars
are excluded by my self-bound,
bare, strange matter.

Stars, I therefore argue,
represent the ground.

2015
with thanks to Debbi Brody for sharing this marvelous writing/collage technique

The Professor Introduces her Old Wardrobe and the New Semester

It was challenging gathering the large pile
of brown and black polyester slacks
and sensible pinstriped skirts without
the never ironed cotton-blend button-up shirts
and permanent press, slouchy cowneck blouses
sliding off the top, but she managed to haul them
towering over her head to the windowless classroom
where students sat quietly with literature books
still in shrink-wrap on their laps
should they decide to drop the class after today.
She heaved and the pile slumped
in the middle of the room like a dead animal.

Students fidgeted in the circle of chairs
she had arranged for just this moment.

A pissed-off Prometheus, she lit
a strike-anywhere match on her blue jeans’ seam
and tossed it on the brindled pile.
It hissed and crackled into a huge black puddle
Catching carpet now a flaming ring.
When she ordered her students
to throw in their chairs and books,
the conflagration drove them from the room.
The fire alarm calmly ordered mass evacuation.
The Professor stood with her class on the lawn,
warming her hands over her place of employment,
passing out wire coat hangers and marshmallows.

2015

Summer Supper

By mid July the biting gnats give up.
And though there may be one or two about,
You, too, must give up fearing six-inch swellings,
Dare to wear vanilla round the holes
Of your face. Reach into zucchini, find the few
That sprang to forearm length before you knew it.

Forget fast food. So easy to sauté quarter moons
With sweet onions—themselves moons sliced
Radially from the core—in butter, olive oil,
Sea salt. Do not measure. Know your salt
Well enough to pour it in your palm.

While moons sizzle golden, take a walk.
Trim dill from lowest stems. Ignore insects
Flushed by your passing. Think cool, green nerves.
Sniff the plump handful on the stone path
Back to the house. The kitchen now a scented fog,
Chop the dill with butcher knife on thick block.

Don’t throw everything you have into the pan.
This isn’t waste. Chickens love kitchen scraps
And dill explodes its firework finale for
Months to come. There’s more. Relax. Remove
The medley from heat. Hum in concert with your lover

While you eat from your plate with fingers.
Suck the buttered song from each one.
Suck his peach barbecue from each perfect rib bone
Cut from the barrow he woke each morning
Through three seasons to feed a farmer’s corn,
To pour steaming water in the trough.

2015

San Francisco Flowers

Tulip clouds
careful trees
crowds of touring
Japanese

hills of condo
rent control
all surprising
grain silos.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Vermillion Flowers

Hearts of flowers may as well be eggs
and wheel hubs—tender yolks.

Before you know it,
eggs grow ears toward cowdom.

A yolk nosed cow
sooner or later makes a sow.

Finally honking cars
with their own pig snouts

are flowers blooming ridge lines
lifting cumulous clouds.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Fine Arts Phenomena

The fountain of water is of the Corinthian order.
Fluted drums become acanthus curls,

Like men’s pant legs.

The frieze across our chests is full
of muscular gods facing the ancient harp.

We know the song has changed.

Columns pretend to be trees, whole
forests fluted with bark, crowned with real leaves.

Columns of cloud feed woods and fountains rain.

The stone dome over your bone dome
is no greater or lesser a feat. Face it.

Clouds and arms are the same. A colonnade.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Sunflowers

A horse head blooms yellow petals
over four legs not its own in sweats
and white sneakers, a tourist.

Cars bloom, spin leaf wheels.

Even mountain peaks pray
for budding yellow petals
when the sun throws rays overhead.

Does everything long to be something else?

The slow nature of time spreads
out the process and lies:
you are only you. No petals allowed.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015

Golden Gates

The earth loves repetition.
Mountains are pyramids.
The Golden Gate quotes the city
On the hill, rolling up into itself
Like clouds. The bridge
Could be a prison or a barge.
Cars mimic clouds rolling to work
Dreaming of being water, blues
Under the bridge or mountains
Sprouting gentrified houses
For people in the center of the fringe.
Look how earth became steel,
How steel became a road over water,
How water would destroy the bridge
If not for painters, for golden paint
Named International Orange
Ironically the color of rust.

2015
in response to Les Barta’s photoconstruction, exhibited at the CACE Gallery of Fine Art in Spring 2015