strange garments

I was naked in sorrow.
You clothed me in vines
of honeysuckle. I fed
sweet orange trumpets
your name
with my own winter whisper
my most tenacious light.
The horns are wilting!
Evergreen clings
to my thin voice.
I rip root fingers
from my lips and throat.
Again I am naked.
I stand here
clutching stunning vines
while sorrow buds
a thousand ears
a thousand eyes.

2011

If you want silence

don’t seek a quiet place.
Let trains rattle and call
dogs          howl
the freeway hum          the rain
fall
in ticks
and taps
the movie mumble
through your
bedroom floor.
It is not necessary
to close
your doors.
Just listen to the lacy din
or each sound
in turn
the way you’d notice
a cloud          or           bird
drifting,
then shift
to the blue        behind.
Fall in.
Silence lives in the shape
around sound.

2011

off the grid

the only woman on earth
who to my face
in pencil
told me
you are a bad mother
met me in an unlikely place
with her husband
who has dedicated himself
to creating the life
for his family
I always wanted
to create
for
myself
and mine

off the grid

we all looked out
at the ocean
stood on a bridge
next to their red
biodiesel jeep
she didn’t apologize
but hugged me
asking
if I could care for
two of her five
children
while they
went on a date
she in her red mini skirt
having lost her mother’s belly
he uncharacteristically
buttoned up
crisp and clean

I did

the youngest escaped
while I gassed up
I caught her just before
the street
buckled her in twice
the oldest boy smiled
we headed down streets
too steep for life
the brakes were gone
not accelerating
not stopping either
I jumped the jeep
wrapped my huge arms
around it, held us
back
from tragedy
with my feet

it was all just a dream

except for the leaden
pronouncement
and my solar wind
powered longing
she still hates me
for the life I live
regardless
of fantastic feet
and a bridge
wielded by my psyche
to this woman in the waking
who is walking my dream

2011

prayer of the petunia

please,
wise
fingers,
pinch
off
the
brittle
bloom
where
my
new
bud
waits.
there
is
more
sweet
scent
to
give
you,
live
you.

2011

Practice Dissolution

You might be afraid.
Feel your body sink and still
Into bed and yellow light.
Your arms too heavy.
Toilet too far away.
The earth of your body
Dissolves into water. You kick
The bedside toilet, swing arms at those who
Can still walk, but you are really kicking
At death. Your mother unfolds

A large absorbent pad beneath you. No one
Says diaper because they love you and your pride.
Water begins its hiss into fire, trickling from you,
Evaporating from open lips and halflit eyes.
Mother begs you, please sip. You do
Because you love her, though you have given up
The comfort of water now, your eyes dull ice.
No one sees the blue light of your water shine but you.
Sister touches your feet, sees liquid
Pool in red constellations beneath skin,
Sinking toward your body’s lowest sky.

Heat seeps past limbs, cool slides in
Like night. Mother’s painbright eyes, sisters’
Whispers begin: it is happening just as the blue book says.
You listen to all this. Your liver a bonfire
For months is finally a coal bed, glowing,
Dimming, sending out sparks, fireflies
Only you can see as breath no longer feeds its flame.

Thin wind rakes your lungs’ groping fingers, plays
The strings of your throat, your last voice.
Silence fills where breath breaks, relaxed lungs
Collapse into green light brightening as the last
Gust huffs from your mouth, eyes shoot

Open to take in the blast of light, clear white.
While your mother, sisters, husband wail
Wordlessly clutching dead hands, pressing heads
Upon your body, stroking your still warm velvet crown,
Turn from them. Countless people, life’s rich personifications
Gather in the widening now and ask your true name.
Awareness opens spherically upon itself. You answer
Without words—what you are—and begin.

2011

The butter, the cool slick

and salt of us warming
becoming more

than two in the merge
warp chest, weft breast,

thighs braided bread
baking, yeast rising

multiplying heart
in heat. We tear

crust, expose white, dip
dripping oil and herbs from

lips. We become all
this, from breath

to bread. God eats us
with our own mouths.

2009/2011

Elegy Written after a Doyra Concert in a Church

Lowing o’er the lea,
the cow did not know

her skin would dance
us in its sound.

Would my skin
could be a drum

to make your
circles move.

Such better use
than windy ash

or box of
halted flesh.

Lover, when I pass
stretch me round

a slice of hollow
tree, string my space

with silver rings,
fly your fingers’

memory, percuss,
percuss, percuss me

2011

While It Happens

Don’t think about it while it happens,
that slippery moment
buckthorn dreams your spines and deep berry eyes
while a neighbor dog barks from your chest.

Notice, don’t think, the ever twirl.

Thyme breathes your nose,
your eight palms: cupped basil leaves
out reaching each other for sun.
Comfrey knits the bells of your tongue
to sweet kneed bees.

Church bells ring your eager skin a church,
calling all in. Heavy, your peony head arches
to earth, petals wilt on your flagstone feet,
your thin neck clutches a fist of fat leftover seeds

Don’t think metaphor, personification or make believe.

Don’t think.
This isn’t the work of similes
or even cosmic permeability.
Rest. Stop swinging
the lamps of your body.

2011

Matters of Little Consequence

Today I am mostly
in the business of tending
matters of little consequence.

If I don’t eat lunch,
I’ll be empty hungry
by supper.

If I don’t write, I’ll pad
through the cool blind house,
or the red stone garden, studying
cracks and pink and green light.

If I don’t play with my boys,
they’ll find their friends and scheme
inside the giant alley lilac carved out
yesterday with dull garden shears
they lost and found at dusk. Their fort.

If I don’t help my daughter,
she will whine until sidewalk weeds
are all whacked, missing her thick book.

If we don’t talk, there will be silence.

If I don’t look at the clock,
the noon horn will still blow
a siren to the town: the day is bright!

But I will. I will eat honey toast and write,
I’ll sit near yarrow and wonder about dry roots.
I’ll laugh with my browned boys unless they cry,
and they often do. I will answer my daughter
when she calls, “Mom?” and hug her for
widening our walk just because it needed done,
even though I didn’t ask. Just once, I’ll look
at the kitchen clock. Alone, we will be
quiet, let summer work its sun
and shade across the unimportant
moonless day.

2011

Three and Sixty-Six Years Ago: A Lost Coin

She says, ‘But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.’

~Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning”

In a darkening corner of the garden not turned
Or planted since the summer he tilled
By hand his own packed hurt, pausing to stare
After my leaving for another weekend—
I could not not go, I’m sorry, all, to admit,
To disillusion those who wished I were more,
We all were more than clods crumbling apart
Riddled with small roots waiting to dart—
I found a small silver coin.
I rubbed it,
Obviously not an ordinary dime. So thin,
What a strange head! Hurried to transplant
The Roma tomatoes before nightfall and
Mosquitos, I pocketed it.

Next morning,
Dressed to plant peppers in last night’s jeans
I remembered. There, so tiny: 1945,
And a head with wings!
The back: a bundle, an axe and olive branch.
Misnamed a Mercury dime by Moderns
Who of course loved the god
Of tricky messages, but no,
It was meant to be Winged Liberty,
A free thinker,
And it was no man,
But a woman, Elsie Kachel Stevens,
Wife of Wallace, beloved Modern
Poet.

At once I wondered
Is she the woman
By the sea who sang
The world into order? Who wondered
About paradise in her peignoir
Eating orange slices
Near the green cockatoo?
I could see her
Sitting very still
For Adolf, the sculptor in their building
Who noticed her
Cheekbones and winged hair,
Searching her lines for the portrait bust—
A model for the coin— with careful hands
In clay and perhaps upon her own neck and face
Making material match material.

I understand how worlds are made.

Adolf gave her the bust.
After her husband’s death,
She tried to let it go.
Her daughter refused to take it
For her mother seemed so fond of it.
No one knows where it is now.
Pawnshop? Attic?
Bottom of the Hudson River
Where she once stood pondering
Him and a blue heron flew?

It is lost,
But her winged head
Was in my garden, thin soft silver
Gashed twice by my own hungry shovel.
Tomatoes send quiet roots
Into soil that once held her.
The new garden holds me, alone,
Sitting quietly in the morning,
Eyes woven green with gentle windy leaves.
Overhead, on a wire, a pigeon sings.