When you asked if I have met the man in Glűck’s “In the Café”

I don’t think I have met this man,
but often I have been this man, and it scares me,
how I forget the dreams in which I’ve lived,
and the pain my forgetting brings those I have loved.

I read Glűck the way I eat food that makes me feel bad.
I love her, the no-nonsense of her, the sad stark word of her,
but she bloats me with shadows and trapped moths.

I approach her poems the way I watch a horror movie,
rarely, invisible hands ready to dart over mouth, eyes, or heart,
whatever is vulnerable, but they don’t move.
I just witness her ripping, or ripped.

Something in her work poisons me, but I go back to it.
I nibbled only a few of her poems earlier today,
and they corroded me somehow by dinner,
tears stopping in my throat over the browning ground turkey.

Last year, before he left, when I learned she was once poet laureate,
I bought her compilation: The First Four Books of Poems.
I remember one night, he, having read some of this book, was quiet
in the La-Z-boy, slow moving through rooms, to think I might feel about him
the way she wrote about her husband, repulsed by the crush of his body.

I think I love her, because in her poems lives are lived that I don’t want to live,
that I feel seeded in me, that I don’t want to water or show spring.
Some, before ever reading them, I have groomed and watched
wilt and consume the smaller, tender shoots of me.

I want to stop reading the way she writes me, but I can’t. Not completely.

Today, searching for her online, inadvertently
running into her late 30s face—our age!—
and the images of her now in her late 60s,
my stomach was raked by what savoring sorrow has done to her skin,
my eyes a bright sting, fearing this might happen to mine.

So, there it is. Me on Glűck.  Glűck in me.

I love her because she terrifies,
eats the hopeless, ropey insides of my fallen soldiers, a Morrigan.
Her black beak sets hope free.

Gold

I wanted to be unfettered by life’s syllabi.
Do this, do that, now this for this until this time.

The truth is summer unmoors me
like a nameless ship, a shapeless is.

I wanted to be a free yogini, nothing
but stretching, breathing, sitting in
a silent crown all day, every day.

The truth is I pretend I am already
enlightened and choose lovemaking
over waking, and wake anyway.

I wanted to be the lonely woman writer
saying what other women don’t have time to say.

The truth is I hardly have time to say it,
and I’m rarely alone, even when I can be.

I wanted to tell every man
no from now on. No.

The truth is, a man saved me,
my everywhere ever his yes.

I wanted to leave this flat whispering place
for mountains and anonymity.

The truth is when I stay I learn a secret alchemy.
Lead is what writes me.

We want

We want to arrive somewhere safe,
a place where what and who we need are near.
We want to know we will go on being loved,
that there is music behind our fragile living
to which death is not the only one dancing.
We want to shake the guitar of living into vibrato
to live like a lover with eyes closed into music,
lips parted loose, unselfconsciously sound.
We want to be touched with gentle purpose,
like wind in yellow grasses. Dance, drop seeds.
We must continue dying, drying out to do so,
become green again and again, find love in pollen,
make love yellow legged in sunflowers.
We want not to suffer separation, and
our wanting makes our suffering worse.
So we save seeds and pollen in jars,
sing to them: we want love to be this easy.

controlled burn

1
I was a bed of orange
coals bursting tiny
blue flames.

You walked across.
I couldn’t burn you.
You couldn’t pour water.

2
Your eyes bowls begging
for the simple rice of me.
There was nothing to spoon
but soot and smoke.

3
I rose, black
smolder, hard
shoulders. You kneaded
me loose, cool hands
unraveling fire knots
of memory. Still I burned,
though you untied
me from me.

4
You towered
beside me, pine
cradling abandoned
fire circled in stones
between your roots.

I stayed in the ring,
licked the air, crackled
for dead growth.
The wind blew.

When what you
thought was you
fell into me, we
made light from what
was no longer needed,
and shook off
fire and wood.

Receiving Wind

Nothing
could have prepared
me for the beauty
of ten thousand winds
moving through
your face. No
words can chase
the running
musculature
of your electricity,
or the flash that flies
the parentheses
of your slightest grin
to mine, or the pride
of your chin.

And how
your eyes from tender
wide to hunger
thin disarm, unfurl me.
Here, take my arms,
make them
four. I would open
every door
for you at once
just to watch
your face walk
through, beyond
and always, always
to me, wind
receiving wind.

Because my son announces Narnia trees! on his seventh winter solstice

Driving across Nebraska
we are witnessed

by a stand, no, a hundred mile strand,
of wizened iced trees.

From every tip, ominously fragile,
sag shining branched veins of glassed light.

I start to slough my skin,
drop muscles, organs, bones like leaves

reveal my nerves and veins,
stand up solid in the sun,

reaching, sagging,
a branched thing, silent and clear.

featured in A Prairie Journal (Winter 2008)

hymn of three cherries and an apricot

you brought a bowl

of orchard cherries

so black red, so well read,

I blush just remembering how

they crushed and

fled their skins inside my mouth.

for the road I saved three,

and a perfect apricot sun

wrapped in a paper napkin,

but not for me. they sat

in the passenger seat, patiently,

a sweet lopsided quartet,

leaning with me around miles

of mountain curves.

the apricot went first.

(oh yes, I dared my teeth)

velvet cleavage, tart bursting

cousin of peach.

(the cherries, singing, start

to preach: O pit,

a wrinkled prayer!)

I meant to save them

for my kids, I really did.

but none were spared.

one by one, over a day

in two cars and a dim morning

kitchen, I hmmmnned them in,

and in and in.

featured on Center for Integrated Arts website, March 2009

spring forward, fall back: what are you doing with your extra Hour, he asked

She made a melody for lyrics she wrote, graded five essays, and

checked her email too many times for words that didn’t come.

She spoke of and sounded the letter H with her youngest son:

Hen, House, and Horse, of course. And didn’t

tell him of a man’s blue Hallelujah eyes, or his Hands

a fivefold Heaven on her Hips.  Instead, she Helped him circle

a Heart.  She also watched a House burn bright across

the prairie of night with her daughter.  Maybe she used

some of the Hour to pray.  For the inhabitants of the House,

and then for her elder son’s friend whose brain is angry with a Hundred

wires, right eye swollen, waiting for seizures to be incised from his life,

because wily electricity can be sliced off our bodies with scalpels.

She also captured vomit once in a bucket, and as she waited expectantly

for the second batch, she Heard from the son concerned with H’s

that throwing up is Hard.  Yes, it is, Honey, throwing up is Hard.

Later, she Hugged her Husband from behind, with Hidden tears,

as he listened to the song she played him all those years ago.

She remembered she loves him, touched by how he seeks to please her,

letting Hair Hang long down along and around his face like a silken windy

Halo.  In that Hour, she inhaled his neck, still Haunted by Hallelujah.  How?

Can her Heart ever be circled?  Hoping for her boys’ sleep, she read

of a fox tamed by a little prince whose Hair, the color of golden wheat,

made the fox Happy, made him anticipate. Then, as she read in bed, to only

herself, after setting her soothing zen alarm clock for Monday morning, thankful

for the extra Hour of sleep she would be getting, she instructed her daughter

to put a peeled clove of garlic in her Hurting ear, rather than rise, rather than

do it for her.  And she fell asleep unsure of where her extra Hour ended or began.

featured in Blood Lotus, Spring 2008

the white blues (out of the blue)

Ice-blue eyes squint beneath

white sky, want to close against

white streets turning black beneath

people moving slowly through January.

Two long toes of a sugar beet plant spew white smoke,

poke up through the blue sky edge of a cloud blanket,

white sheet unable to stretch far enough west to cover

the feet of a sleeping town.

To this bright blue gap the eyes rise

before resting on anything white, try to fly

out this window to invisible western mountains.

But perched in a skull on the eastside of town,

they cannot see the icy peaks promising sea

a thousand miles beyond their snowy seam. Instead

eyes close and look inside, find a mindscape

just as white as land and sky today. This hidden sight

rides any willing memory: restless horses

wild eyed with pining, despair straining

to flee, to be anywhere but endless fields of white,

trying to run through some man’s sky-blue eyes

unable to receive their flight. The horses

rear and cry for all the empty places of life. 

Not empty like hunger or angst, but empty

like snow, crystals of water full of space and cold,

refracting light. It is space that takes the flake’s radial shape,

shining as it melts away. Space that makes the eyes too free

to know what or where to think, seek blue. The space

around the horses doesn’t blink. The eyes can’t ride

away. They open, become this I writing in ink, and suddenly

I am space taking a drink of peppermint tea. And space

crossing her legs trying not to think about the space

between his ebbing eyes and the melting

ice of mine.  The blue sky retreats. Go ahead and cry.

This is all I know to write when there is this much white

and I can’t see beyond the space inside the radiating pattern

of me:  warming, spreading, heading toward every sea.