wordweeds

There is work like a sea
in which you must swim.

There is work like cutting
ropes from your limbs.

2017

When he threw Amor Fati
into flames, friends and poets gasped.

White book! Heads shook.

I ran to find mine bubble wrapped
in briefcase, amateur sky
with all the colors in it.

ah jumped in after Jack like a sigh,
after Danny’s hurled script, wanting nothing
more than for words to say nothing,

burn, be nothing with his.
Daiva turned his glowing pages with a stick.

We acolytes of Jack-spent light!

Unreadable ash
made of us and especially
Jack gibbering joy-scat

to the earless moon, hands
grasping at the halo like a drowning man,
fingers coming up empty and fool.

2017
This is a revision of the poem I posted on Feb. 20, 2017, in loving memory of Jack Mueller who died yesterday on April 27, 2017. He lives on and on in the Word.

Of sixteen since last spring:
Four chickens remain.
Six killed for fun by two Great Pyrenees,
A mother and pup
Who ran across the prairie in April rain,
Left birds limp necked,
Scattered in dripping weeds.
Then gone the oldest in the flock:
DJ Cluck dragged off northwest.
Next, the Leghorn, white,
Easy target from above.
Not a feather left. I theorize
About light colored hens,
Imagine startling talons, sudden height.
But then went Speck.
Her camouflage no help.
Still, I should have known.
Predators have a taste for the sweet.
Next, in one morning, we are missing three.
Goodbye, Elsa. Goodbye, Fawkes and friend.
There will be no more green eggs
Once the cartons are empty.
I blame the watching hawk,
Dorell suspects the local owls,
Their early morning duet.
He suggests we take a walk
To the base of their favorite tree
To look for bones. Suddenly I think
Of owl pellets I used to collect,
Full of mouse skulls, still whole.

2017

Counting sound in limerick
Bursting with the ego’s trick:
Scholar poet doggerel
Makes the female bosom swell.

2017

Kitten
Glue eyed
In playful pile
Of wide eyed siblings
Leaps.

2017

Promise yourself to dig up the rest come fall.
Procrastinate before first frost.
Blame your job.
Forget until snow falls.
Ignore regret’s negative self-talk.
Touch their mushy shoulders come spring.
Witness what you thought was dead sprout green.

2017

My words are hiding in his body.
Perhaps I am the culprit.
Self-saboteur who hid them there.
Home alone no poems come.
I wait in long space. He walks in at dusk
in canvas clothes, the poem I didn’t write,
with huge thighs, silk arms,
towering white smile like moonshine,
torso warm locomotive stillness.
I hold my breath a moment like kids
passing through a mountain tunnel.
He moves through me. I can’t say why
I was made for this, why I mourn
no muse. Four years I have lived
with a man who doesn’t know
he is my favorite poem.

2017

After the lovemaking, after his voice softens
in apology, it is likely best to steer clear
of parsing small omissions that often
mean no more than there are bigger things here
than fretting over who has kept a pocket-
sized fib to oneself. No need to get hysterical,
but one small stab of why soon needs a tourniquet.
Bleeding through the kitchen, playing oracle,
I ask myself, what does omission mean? What
did I do to make him feel he’d need a priest
to seek forgiveness? My worst fear: he’s cut
me from his wary ex’s cloth, the woman I am least
like in my book. I black her off of pages on his shelf,
afraid, by reading her, I wrote her on myself.

2015, 2017

The morning after you sold the farm,
Did you wake early to milk the cows,
And, remembering, simply stand in the dew
In your button up gold sweater
And brown fedora tipped just so
To watch the yellow creep up the oak
In your new neighborhood?

I can hardly believe the only time
I remember of you is the many years
Of your retirement in Meredosia,
Hands on your hips to study sky
And cocklebur fields where we kids
Would play king of the mountain
On construction dirt piles, pushing.

You would puff your cherry tobacco
Pipe on the small concrete patio
Behind your house, announce if the world
Smelled like rain on the way, as if that
Knowledge were all that remained
Of your dairy days. It was enough to plant
A slow seed in me, plucking burs from my socks.

2017

Hecate crisscrosses
Milky deserts
Of wrinkled mythos,
Humus crumbles
From her shoes.
Ancient archivist,
She plucks a whisker
From her chin to write
The rascally world.

2017

Two flowers.
Two birds.
Two women.
Two flying squirrels.
One man.
He makes his maps,
Translates hope for legs
Into one black wing.
The counted and named
Look away,
Avoid his gaze.
Too late—
He has already made
Himself a feathered God,
And the world: a woman full
Of twins
Who will destroy him.

2017

On little couch, I’m tight between
my youngest son and Love.

There’s the obvious:
Earth and sun.

I’ve been between a cabin
And Salida twenty years.

Wandering a sagebrush dream
Between abstract and concrete.

Incision and Death.
Prairie fog, white Leadville breath.

Mope and door.
Silence and the ringing ear.

Empty freezer,
Black boar.

Speckled hen,
running cow.

Now.

2017

1
I dreamt the white dress standing in front of a mirror
With my perfect man who would soon read the letter
I wrote him when I was 16 in Young Women’s class
At church in which I promised purity and to be
Temple worthy. We would learn our real names.
The mirror behind us would reflect the mirror before us,
Our faces would recede into infinity. We would learn
The secrets of godhood together. Populate worlds.

2
Pregnant, I wore a dusty rose dress on a mountain
His mother almost died climbing. He slid the ring
Jagged with peaks on my finger, said, “With this ring
I hold you forever.” Terrified at such solidity, I replied,
With Zuni water ring, “Please wear this token
Of my love, constant and changing as the ocean.”
One morning, a year later, I woke and the tide
Had gone too far out. I left him on land.

3
We wore only our hair and braided two long strands
Of it together, cut with a knife under the tree
Where our son was born the year before.
We put the braid in a leather bag with our children’s
Fingernails, my milk, a raven claw. Love medicine.
Inexorable drift. When he moved out, he took the knife
From the wall. I packed the family medicine in boxes,
Puzzled that something had eaten our feathers.

4
No dress. No mirrors.
No mountain. No rings.
No braid. No tree.
Just chickens. Garden.
Bees. Rolling plains.
Tiny house. Pond singing spring.
Sleepless reach. Wordless gaze.

2017

Brown couch of our slump
White bed of our wilt
Eyes close, bloom sleep

2017

A motion-activated light switch
Ignores the shadow bulk of my body,
Waits instead for my passing hand,
My passing hand, my passing hand.
Damn it! My office doesn’t want
To wake up either.

2017