How to Herd Moths

Turn off the ceiling light.
Hold your small bedside lamp
overhead like Lady Liberty.
Lovingly lure them from blinds,
corners, ceiling and walls,
open the window, reach outside,
shake them loose into cool night.

A few may refuse.

Think.  An hour before sleep,
turn off all upstairs lights
except above the bathroom sink.
Leave the door open a crack, a lean beacon.
Wait.  Peek in to see the velvet clicking
herd, mad with their love of light,
whirling dervishes of night.  Breathe.

Minutes before sleep, screech open
the screenless bathroom window, squint
against dozens of diving wings, brush your teeth,
pull the light’s string, close the door:  done.
By morning, the bathroom will be empty.
While we dream, moths free
themselves into rising sun.

Time to wake up

My dream…Something good was about to happen. I was trying to go back there.
~Samuel, age 7, in tears upon waking late for school after ignoring his mother’s calls

Sometimes, no matter that we slap ourselves to stay awake,
we fall asleep. We wake within someone else’s dream,
driving past their 7-11, their grocery carts, speeding through
their neighborhoods, getting pulled over by their police.

We go with it. Wear their brand of bra. Raise children
in their schools.  Watch their favorite movies: horror.
They tolerate ours: foreign drama. Years pass.

We try to remember the dream we were having before,
the one where something good was about to happen.

Then the dreamers who pulled us in—leave,
leave us in their dream.  We walk their streets
at night. Paint their walls. Tend their weeds.

We twist and kick to wrest ourselves awake.
Speak in a dream tongue no one else speaks.
The dream quakes. Its inhabitants turn away.
Maybe someone watching us sleep sees

our lips move, hears the sounds becoming heavy
words:  wake me. They do. We grab our children’s
hands and try to pull them through.

But the dream holds on to our feet just when
something good is about to happen,

because something good is about to happen,
is always happening, and to be awake means
something we never dreamed.

Mantras

Sit under the full moon
until you are sitting there,

and the week’s riot orchestra
is replaced by crickets,

and crescendos
and is replaced again.

Wind raises skin
and orange moon

brims to white while words
of the busy day grow quiet, replaced

by sky, glinting space.  It may be
morning before the messages

sift through  and out of you, so slow,
though speed has moved such water through

the body to burst, aching diaphragm
a fist.  Unclench, unclench,

the crickets pitch at angles.  And owl
begs its usual who? who? who?

unblinking under moon,
and Oh, mmm,  mmmm.

The chest opens its lid.
Breath joins the gentle wind.

Lidless, you are more
than you, and blissfully less.

2009

Green

Somehow my thumb is not green
Anymore, or hasn’t been
For the past four years of pulling green
From the bank and students’ minds.

My house plants died.
My garden is awry
With dried up useless weeds.

But the clover I was given
Ten years ago has survived
And survived and survived.

What spark in those blind
Tuberous roots shines?

Is it my hope?
Is it my refusal to grieve?
Is it God?

No matter how limp, shriveled,
Brown, barren, or how deep
My disappointed sigh,
All it wants, like me, is gentle
Water, living soil, light.

Up come the tender leaves
That fold up at night!
Up come the fingered cups
Reaching, nodding, sun white!

How many dozens of springs
Has it given me in ten years of life?
Why wait on the springtime sun
When the sun is my own sight?

of breasts and mushrooms

A loose jowled, broad shouldered woman in black
wanders our camp with large handled basket and
pendulous breasts swinging freely beneath peasant blouse
above thin legs. She asks in lilting accent, perhaps French,
“May I have your mushrooms?” as though they were ours
only for camping for a price on a mountain where air hums
with RV generator songs. Admiring her trespass of parceled
campground boundaries, her astute respect for American
habits of possession in a quest for fungal delicacies,
and having enough delighted in their frumpy company peeking
at my pointing children from tiny mosses and pine duff, I say,
“Yes, of course,” and notice her basket nearly full, soil clinging
to creamy sponge roots below dozens of burnt red waxen caps,
echoing her own robust form.  She squats and pulls. Wanders.
Squats and pulls some more, looks up at me, around me,
as I write. I want to walk with her, watch her cook these mysteries
over fire, taste her Rocky Mountain dreams of French cuisine.
I imagine, instead, her crossing into other camps, ambassador, visiting
my rough brothers-in-law, their blonde wives, leaning against red
trucks and silver mini vans, not far from here, through lodge pole pines,
her gentle request, their eyes upon her passing swaying breasts,
crude comments chuckled beneath beer breath,
relieved their own wives’ tits are tucked away,
firmly compressed, hiding their age, padded and wired
from wandering eyes, mushrooms unable to rise,
no nipples greeting the duff of day.

featured in Four Corners Free Press, September 2011

in a bardo house

you take down the photos
of family and red and gold
smooth paintings of nudes

because the doors
are now open to those
who have made you

want to leave
from the beginning.
now they wander

your halls, the only
place you were
ever yourself

and they become
the critics you
feared, making

pronouncements:
you are inappropriate.
you don’t belong here.

so you strip the walls
of anything that will
remind them you will

burn in hell so they will
buy your home
so you can leave

this hell
they’ve made of preparing
for heaven.

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