Beltane: A Birthday, A Bear, A Binding

My skin gathers in a film around the quartz, mica and bones
of this land that sit like mothers on our window sills, on this longer
day than yesterday, when I turned twenty-nine on the twenty-ninth.

The night before my birthday, our beer bottles and sticky cans
were scattered, bird feeders knocked down, scarred lids
and buckets of seed emptied, peppered down the terraces of this hill.

A bear, lumbering beneath and up the ponderosa where I have hung
and knelt with you to birthe our boy, reached for feeders, spilt them
over sage. There is not a seed left on the ground where she licked.

And tomorrow, we will sit beneath the broken bough,
on licked ground imagining her hungry tongue,
halfway between spring and summer, smoking

a cherrywood pipe, cutting our hair with a hunting knife,
braiding our locks into threads of red, yellow, white and each other,
tying off the end with black, where death is. There will be grey hairs,

and blond, from you, henna from me, and somehow they will wind,
fingers reaching over fingers, and under, into each other, this love
medicine, this charm for two for whom these twisting hairs sing.

Year after year, we will make a longer, thinner braid,
leaving bald patches hidden in our hair, already growing
to replace what was lost in our joining.

A Dear Jane to the Colorado Mountains

You are the bait.
Everyone loves you.
Everyone stares
at your breasts
when they speak. You
don’t blush or say
“I’m up here,” pointing
at your eyes.  Instead,
as soon as we’re in sight,
you take hold of bellies,
pull the thread and yank!
We lose our breath,
wanting only you.
Demanding, insatiable,
expensive lover…
Jealous, I’ve loved you blue.
But your plain, flat-
chested sister is a tender
lover too. Not easy, granted.
Not you.  People look
right past her
even at her best
but her heart of corn is true.
Her needs are simple:
Just stay. I do.
She sends me owls, asking,
Who are you, who, who?
And I am shocked,
Someone new.

And if she could, just today, she would say:

Let us not be joined by dreams of a shared house
Or endless days of children screaming.

Must there be this mundane quantity?
Let us meet, and meet, and meet, here.

Beyond stained kitchen sinks,
Beyond shared impending poverty,

Beyond my socks tumbling with yours
In an eternal laundry.

Let’s bare our feet
And run between

These domesticities.
Here is just as sweet.

Waking up on my 39th birthday

Yellow white light, unknown birds,
first sight, first sound, first
day of my fortieth year.

Somehow, my boys also woke
naturally , sparing me the normal
morning routine, the horrible beep, beep, beep.

Happy birthday, Mama, from the fifteen year old
girl I never see. Happy birthday, Mom, from the small boy, seven,
sockless, descending stairs, otherwise fully dressed.

Happy birthday, Mommy, from the big boy, ten,
with a kiss. And O! the small boy announced,
It is Poem in Your Pocket Day!  I am shocked.

After four decades, this much bliss!
We found and pocketed four poems,
walked four ways into morning, into this.

She has fallen out of love

When he felt the cloud kiss his cheek
that morning at the pond, and the boys
wouldn’t hush, and  it didn’t matter
as he cast and cast around his fly,

flying mobius band of glinting light,
he didn’t know his wife would cry
in bed that night: she feels caught.
He would carefully listen

and carefully respond
as eleven years have taught.
She would hold her forehead
with her palm in the dark.

She would tell him all the muddy
catfish snags of her love,
all but the one that would snap
the line, rip the hook from her heart.

my body

is a startled flock
of starlings darting out
and out, parting and mending.
or maybe it is my heart
with no ground, my love
with no trees, swooping black
iridescent pieces and skrees,
circling, circling.

Reluctant Sonnet While Drinking Microbrewed Beer in Boulder

My mouth has been a cobwebbed house for
days. This limping heart:  iambic, pacing
halls of broken words, then quickly racing
to thesaurus’ closed red doors.
I’ve never felt so linguistically poor,
searching pockets bare so I may sing
of scribbled on receipts that may ring
true, not leave me searching more.

It’s this damn Petrarchan sonnet!
Snotty tyrant dictating my rebel day
into perfect stanzas, rhythm, rhyme.
Only brew has helped me force the form upon it.
Screw this puzzle! I’ve got more to say
than can be squeezed into this fourteenth line.

Weeping Fig

Spiraled
Ficus Benjamina,
I imagine your roots
A fisted knot, pushing
Against walls of ornate
Pot, unable to outgrow it, unable
To live outdoors. Still, you push
Out leaves on dying twigs,
Drop them, crispened
Handkerchiefs.

Meditation on white until the waiter dropped a saucy fork

I never wear white or when I
do, it is with vigilant
suspicion of small

hands smeared
with jelly, paint or random
child-loved condiments.

I erased white
from my wardrobe
when I gave birth.

Nearly fifteen years
of colored clothing and
lately, mostly brown

and black. Why?
What turn has brought
me down

to muted hue,
or hue’s lack?
But today—divorce,

fathers far away,
three children gone
for days—has brought me

white!  All day in white!
Woven light
cool cotton blouse,

buttoned bright summer, sheer
over flesh and self-conscious
underthings.  White

as baptism for the living
and dead, white as a virgin’s wedding
gown, white as a sadhu’s ash-

smeared head. O! The righteousness
of white! The innocence!  I feel
reborn!  Until

now:  two
hours from midnight,
my short shoulder sleeve splashed

red.  Red!  My mother always
said it was my true
color.

Small Town, Wide Range

Brush.
Its name its natural landmark:
Fields of undifferentiated sage
Whose pungent shadows

Stoically quake in ammoniacal air,
Wrap around calculated corners
Of feedlots and whispering cornfields,
Not daring to grow along herbicidal sidewalks.

People are born, grow old, and die here.
Running, then walking, then wheeling and finally
Wheeled around their last days in one of a dozen sterile
Hallways heralded by this home of nursing homes.

People come to Brush to die, just ask longtime locals
Or restless folk seeking teaching experience
Before they move on, back to cities or mountain hamlets
More brilliant for the existence of Brush.

I have not come here to die, but to live in hushed streets,
Empty after dark, where windows blaze blue
And small town sky stars yield to American Idol’s.
Where are the poems hiding? I didn’t want to find them, at first.

It was easier to find a poem in Crested Butte
Or Red Feather Lakes. Even their names are poems.
There, poems yodel from pine needles, dawdle
In strobed dapple of aspen leaf shadows, jaunt

Across meadows with proud antlers, sparkle
Off spectacular peaks, tremble in our knees.
But we are not a hamlet nestled in the cupped hands
Of mountains.  Our poems lie low to the ground, strangled

In language unspoken in Vail, Aspen, Boulder, whose travelers,
If they linger, if monolingual, hear a mumbled muddy Nothing
On our littered river trail. Their adrenaline loving fingers demand:
Where is rock climbing, white water, white slope?  West of here,

We say, and they go home. You have to live here a while to see
Where poems hide. And even then, you have to polish your own
Damned dullness before they shine. I know. Cupped in crooked
Knuckled sagebrush sleeps a dusty wood, a hapless, unhurried,

Bird-loved river. Flat, sandy, downright swampy when you walk
Along it in places. Between quiet columns of mullein wait
Drab flat stones, cheerful lost paint balls, grey goose feathers
And rusted bullet casings. I’m no hunter.

I gather these poems in my pockets, place them, priceless
In the hands of my young boys, who, respectively, skip, pop,
Ruffle and arrange like silos these forgotten leavings, finding
Their final use: joy.