Sestina: Though it really isn’t about mothering after all

When I first began thinking about dust
and my life was no longer full of the clutter
of pious Sunday mornings planted
on pews, and I stopped dreaming of being married
for time and all eternity, I became rebelliously content
with the thought of never being a mother.

Of course I didn’t talk to my mother
about this.  She had taken the losing of my dusty
virginity so hard. But I could hardly be content
with what Mormon women were or wanted to be; I decluttered
my mythology of such whitened rooms, no longer married
to the appled serpent of penitent servitude or connubial godhood. I planted

myself in groundlessness, got lost in weeds planted
by Sylvia, Virginia, Kate:  my mothers whom the word “Mother”
could not claim, though it may have killed them, married
to thousands of years of dust.
But they juggled and loved this clutter
into words and women: Edna, Esther, Orlando, me. The content

of our skin no longer content
with the time between dishes, diapers, and planted
petunias. But putting my head in an oven, carrying a clutter
of stones in my pockets and sinking into a river, lake or sea in order to mother
myself into solitude so deep and the artless sleep of dust
seemed a worse fate than being married

to a family’s endless needs.  So:  I dreamed against my foremothers.  If I married
a man, but also myself to myself, mastered the art of being content
with the miraculous mundane, marveled at my children’s skin becoming dust
and wrote or lived epiphanies about the peppermint I planted
going rogue, I could possibly be a bridge mother, a rhizome mother, a mother
who could avoid murderous ovens and water, teach children to turn clutter

into love, teach myself to be a brave, awake mother.  For years this lovely clutter
breathed in wordless poems, fleshy paintings only for me, in awe. But being married!
Oh, we try!  The silent years and midnight longings of exhausted, unearthed mothers,
roots dangling over husbands’ pots, ever resurrecting our wilted desire.  Discontent:
the distant contentment of husbands planted
firmly in the comfortable dust

of us, or who we were supposed to be. Perhaps the dust of husbands is a clutter
I can’t contain, that can’t contain me, like the dandelions no one planted, married
deeply to wind and soil, content, reaching wild through a dark mother.

2009

Detachment

You’ve walked in like a worldless god
and claimed me as your home.
How is it these arms cannot hold?
How is it this hair needs no tangled hands,
these thighs no tremble? Whose breath is this?
Are you a demon or an angel?
You, wordless, whisper, give it all away.
At once I am an onion cliché, peeling back and back
in your hands. And there are no tears
for what falls: couches, hair, clothes,
trinkets, houses, a rainbow of countless gods,
and no tears to find that, smaller
and smaller, I am okay. I am
an emptiness that watches and waits
to be passed through.

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.