wordweeds

We could say the planet is a head,
Its nose the Atlantic,
The corners of its mouth
The tips of puzzled continents,
Its eyes the U.S. and Middle East,
If eyes were power,
If power were crude.
But darlings, the globe is no head.

What metaphor are we,
With 15 billion eyes and ears,
Wombs doubling life
Into gloved and ungloved hands,
Spilling what’s left
Into blind hospital buckets,
Deaf dirt floors.
What metaphor?

Perhaps instead the earth
Is a metaphor for us—
Ancient, once whole,
Always drifting,
A war of currents,
Frozen in our farthest reaches.
I would give up this globe
If I could.

When I wake up,
My eyes are no seas,
My voice is no America,
My skin is no Scotland,
My womb is no Sweden,
My heart is no Ireland,
My hands are no Germany,
My name is no Wales.

Poems cannot hold me.
I am content to stand—
A seeing salt and dirt—
And walk across the room
To you who are no Africa, no Omaha,
But space wrapped in a man.
They’ll say you are a metaphor for me;
I am a metaphor for you.

2013

We watch from behind
The wire that burns.

Have worried
The proper distance
From their box in the grass,
Its swinging doors.

Sometimes the windows laugh.

The curly cow
Throws cobs we ignore,
Comes and goes;
Glances linger
Over her shoulder.

Every dawn she disappears,
A silver breath cut through pasture,
Returns with many bags.

She chews
A grassy language.
Sometimes moos.

The big bull
And their calves moo, too.

This would be confusing
But for the vacant
Stillness in their eyes.

That we recognize.

Alone, each studies us
And breathes.

They rarely stop
In twos and threes.

How eerie
We never see them eat.

2013

Herds of tumbleweeds,
Hounded by the prairie rake,
Tremble on fences.

2013

So grey and low, like the cloud you brought
to bed November named, weighing not
of whales or weaning calves, but two small girls,
seventeen hundred miles between and three
and a half years of no visiting while you hid
in mountains, swam in the eyes of a woman
who could not love, heavy as she was with drink.

I bring my own cloud named October, leaden
with my long-dead sister, our fatherless childhood.
I am not your child, love, but I am proof.
Of what? What grows in the empty space
left by fathers? How many times will fall
return before you climb into the arms
of my fatherborn words: You are a good man.

2013
with thanks to Rosemerry for the whales

after Wendy Videlock

This woman is a lumen who
Would seem to understand

How all at once
She’s tube of flesh,

And flux of light,
And empty plant.

2013

It so happens I’m tired
Of not being able to tell you
What I’m tired of.

Dull thirty-eight-eyed apathy,
Here’s my professional smile.

Screen-livers, blissful killers
Of HD enemies,
Laughing Picassoless packs:

Here is uncold cold,
Hot tiny haiku ices
Pricking 3-D cheeks.

Feel. You study Guernica
For the dates, perhaps
The gentleman’s C.

How boring to be tired like this.
The day the paper is due,
half the class goes missing.

Our apathy is bigger
Than absent Mondays,
Late October fog,

Synthetic
Carpet hallways
And free popcorn.

Tired of Excel sheets
And my own signature,
I swallow complaint.
Eat paper. Gag. Pay bills.

It drives me to seek
Nothing in everything.
Some brand of happy nihilism.

Brave the hollow!
Like Neruda’s woody root
Moved through,
Words spread out, destined.

Rhyzomic, blind and empty.
We reach to mean outwardly.

But let’s say our word-carved features
Are simply furniture rearranged.

We’ll never know who is sitting
In us, for how long, or where.
But surely, the who will get tired
Of the view and move on.

2013

I cut out five
People’s hearts
To find who
I thought was me.
Salt woman, I uprooted
While the family house fell,
Yet the walls still stood.
One of the hearts
Was mine, listening.

Its right ear pressed
To the floor, the other to the sky.
The colonel couldn’t have them anymore.
When I fucked myself over,
I was my own colonel.

Now I build the house
I loved and left, over and over
In my mind. Its bathroom
Made of slate and free light.
He who loves me now,
Who heals my grief, builds it again
For my feet. I shower there.

To construct peace, to make
Love, to reconcile/ to reach
The limits of ourselves/ to let go
The means, to wake.

When I wash off the mask, the one
In which I am swimming Kate
Or Virginia with rocks
In her pockets, his eyes are so soft
On me I can’t blink or turn back.

The voice inside
The mask said his smile
Has baobab roots. That is when
I knew I was worth my salt.

Salt in the seams
Of my dirty laundry.
I danced it for him.
He danced his for me.
We were beautiful.
Undressed,
We washed and folded
What wasn’t us.
Tucked it into magic
Drawers. Our eyes—
Always naked,
Four open doors.

No words walk
The path between them.
How is it this space
Is the house of every god?

2013
with thanks to Julie Cummings for
helping me build an eight-room poem,
Carolyn Forché for the colonel
and Muriel Rukeyser for the fourth room

We doubted the water would come
and slept without clothes—
the privilege of the blithe and warm.

Valuables left down low,
we slept, sure four miles
of rising plains would swallow

the river, its tossled snakes
and mountain limbs, long
before it swallowed ours.

You folded into night and me,
Scant light, our fragile boat.
Uneasy waking, 3 a.m.—

highway and house
without a hum. No semis.
No power. No water pump.

(Proud child of apocalypse, I had filled
the jugs despite your gentle jibe,
Oh, baby, we won’t lose electricity.)

Curiosity dressed and drove
us to the bridge they wouldn’t let us see.
Fat men and flashing sent us home.

We never saw it rise, love, but of course it rose
a mile wide. Next morning, yesterday’s
unconcerned cows grazed on higher ground.

I only dreamed it dark and slow,
inching up the edges of my low-banked
mind, the cool swell eating my

silent roads and fish bone shores,
forcing us north of the river, of towns—
for three days, bridgeless, blessed.

Drinking from the hard well,
Love wrung out our water
while others fell and homes molded

one hundred miles west.
I’m not sorry they were blissful days.
Is that horrible to say?

2013

Our bedtime
velocity of circles—
time bent
space spent
transcendent pupils
unsolvably squaring
love’s circumference.
Oh unpatterned centers!
Without repeat
we teach the impossible end
in every irrational reach.

2013

the subject line:
Broke Road

the photo: a common
place we can’t go

like me: small cliff
and shallow waterfall

the center line:
beauty eaten yellow

2013
after the South Platte flood