Because I am corralled

What I thought were my boy’s sour socks
were not.  This feedlot town was seeping through
the cracks of my house, its dark whispers and sorry cows.

And the dog looked as sad as I am, so we went out
unleashed to walk in it, and pray, and then forget
to pray, because the moon came up an egg,

because there was breath and wind even in this stench,
and sky wider than this place.  And though I want to race
from here like wild eyed, shit smeared steers,

here I must stay, until the watery ears
of Crestone Creek hear the words of my leaf
tossed in toward the sea, whispering, away, away.

How to make her talk

Word loves to make love
to watch the angles his
chin makes
thrown back into shadow
through dim light drawing lines
over his
gently closed lids and plucking
lips, pulling fruit from limbs
and standing ridges of skin

Word knows she was made flesh
for good reason, that she, that his, is
the finest
flesh there is, giving shape to love,
giving hands and wide silken curves
to sound,
so round here, word
leaning into word.

Their bodied words, after one week
of silence and August lead
become the breath
of interspiraled, ribboned speech,
juicy peaches in teeth, dripping
chins of abc’s, grinning spins
toward what is,
and what silence can never be

Anne Waldman made me do it

Because I was a hungry spiral
Because I was worried I’d die a curve bruised by a square
Because I was fingers spread too wide for a narrow palm

I was a silent woman.
I was a white lying woman.
I was a halflight woman.
I was a sleep on my side of the bed woman.
I was a true love is bullshit woman.

Because I didn’t have the courage to spring on my own
Because I needed someone to pull me spinning out of the mud
Because smiling crooked teeth and wide warm hands smoothed my angled heart beat

Now I’m a singing galaxy woman.
Now I’m a rainbow truth woman.
Now I’m a ten thousand suns woman.
Now I’m a dream of the one I’m with woman.
Now I’m a no shit it’s true love woman.

blossoms before roots

You stood me in white blossomed arms
of a crabapple tree, and then your

arms were branches, fingers supple twigs
singing against the wind of me. Flowers

bloomed from budded tongues
became our kiss and then we sprayed

a golden pollen through the air,
a prayer to coming fruit. I swear your sap

runs through my trunk and sends
me up but whispers root, take root

We never became a solution

I tried.
At the bottom,
looking up through
liquid you.
At times,
with shaking
I would float,
glowing,
glinting light in you.
You held me.
You tried.
But I
always settled,
slave
to chemistry.

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.