The faith of hounds

Church bells ring at 9 o’clock
People called to pews
From aerial view,
crawling ants
disappear into squares
Old hound howls out
low-oh-only
low-oh-only
low-oh-only me
and stops when the bells do
a prayer in her tail

2007

with thanks to E.B.

I love this body

the way it things and flattens.
The way its desk is a mess
today, but not always.
The way it cries when
an old woman can dream
of making love to a limping
young man and rewind in slow
motion and fast forward in slow
motion a man making love
to a woman he realizes is not
a woman, not sure what she is,
and falling compelled toward
her in a taxi anyway. This body
could touch itself, but won’t,
awaiting its lover, love. This body
whose breasts have fed
and sag and wait for kiss,
tongue, lips, fingertips. Its hair
keeps growing without it knowing
it grows. The body shaves and trims it,
plucks. This play of skin and hair and limb
and organsong. In tune and out,
sometimes eating hotdogs and gods.
Whatever I is wants
to wake up here, hear
the mumbling hundred eight pigeons
on the cornice of the abandoned blonde
brick school, see pixels through wings
of the mayfly in July, remember Joseph Brodsky,
feel its liver creak with wine made by
its ex-husband given with hopeful sad eyes,
watch people watching through lenses, stop
wanting change and loving this all at once.
Or doing both with bliss. So new, it reaches
for a light switch that has never been
in the same old house in which it lives.

Reverie in Green

We are so much water, it is no wonder
even when we have been held all night,
all morning, by a light filled, spacious cabin,
we go outside and follow the wet roar
we heard the night before when we arrived,
somewhere north.

We study downed limbs and crushed, rusted cans
under a young sun to remember the way back, trusting sound
will take us somewhere safely shaded by midday.

And there it is. The lowest place on this limb
of hill, flowing.  We must be like this, willing
to sink into the lowest places, quench them,
make green with our own falling dance through
space, over rocks and mossy beds, past powerless
immersed twigs, useless rudders steering
back and forth in currents, snagging red leaves,
pulling on staunch, still trees.

Oh this green at the edge of wet! It blesses
our bare feet, sends roots around rock, into spongy
soil, clinging, unmoved by gallons of gravity.
Green holds on. Witness of shift and shadow’s icy shine.

Six pointed stars of green. Long waving blades
of green. Bundled sponges of submerged green.
My heart—what is this thing?—a star and blade and sponge.

The roar opens inside, tugs my body downhill,
a thread pulling me through the eye
of a needle of sound, this fabric of falling clearly
down, seeking whatever is barren and crisp, whatever
has roots that have forgotten their throats.

Let me find these roots in you, my love, let me sink
into your loamy triumph, cradle stones of shame, fill
you plump with this that makes us live, this pouring
with which we brim bowls and mouths and parched hearts.
Watch them swell and shoot stars, watch the blades
we’ve pushed through bend like grass, not knives
but long reachings, green swayings toward the roar.

waking into sleep, take your waking slow

You wake up a sphere
of clear crystal and the bed
is in you. The blinds shoot

curved through your belly
and light glints where
there are no eyes.

You roll out of bed
and surprising legs lift
you, hands touch

your belly, shoulders
open, tangled hair
catches still

air, and the invisible
eyeball itches,
now two.

You scratch their edges,
rub with clumsy fists. Blink.
Shuffle to the toilet, the mirror.

And the flesh’s uncertain
and certain longings begin
knotting the endless net

of thoughts by which you
organize your day into
that which you

want and don’t want
to fall through you. This
is the morning’s way.

with thanks to Roethke, Emerson and Tenzin Wangyal

2010

and this poem is finally a leaf

My poems have been a gas
powered lawn mower
with a duct taped wheel,
an electric weed eater flinging

pebbles into spiral galaxies
and blistered palms around brooms
on sidewalks littered by trees
pruned by hail.

My poems have been wordless
rich stench of gasoline and ripped
green, the ping of stones
against chain link, the weeds

whose roots I’m too tired
to pull, too careful
to poison, so the roots
stay, the green flies.

Buddhist sages say thought
is the root of speech, speech
the stem of actions, actions
the leaves. And I wonder

if my garden means me.

To the Word

Thank you for the way you shape
my lips and train my tongue to flatten,
bend and reach for teeth.  How did sound
come to mean, to be, you? What strange technology
of intelligent flesh led hands to break
you down to curls and lines, now wires and waves
for which we pay? All to say: look here, listen.
Some say you were here before us all,

in the beginning, that you were God.
Perhaps it’s true and our bodies are nothing
but the curled script of you. Write, revise
yourself into being. Vibrate, move matter
in your scratching invisible ink, nothing
more than song. And song: you without spaces.
You: fluid undefined, but meaning, more or less.

I ask you, friend, what does the word of my living mean?
The ways my quarks scream and dance, our hand
cannot keep up, hand of song and sound, listening,
every pore an ear, an eye in every hand, trying to see,
to hear light or make it, stealing space between the quantum
waves of me, though me is not the word I seek.

Is there a space sound does not fill, where you do not spin?
If there is, we could not live in this inhospitable place.
Let us not think of it, or speak its name, so it will go away.
Though I is a lie, and I am yours to write or erase, I pray:
Great Utterable Word, here is my hand. Tell me what to say.

college campus trees

trees white
and green flash clouds
their leafy teeth. a line
of younger trees are each
tethered to white tipped farm posts,
sentinels of fragile limb and wind.
may they live until the day
my children climb them,
toes dug into bitten bark, birds
scattering at our imminence,
limbs trembling.  we’ll look
down at the grass, so well
manicured, dead on each
hacked end, wishing
it were trees, more able
to dance, tickle, whisper.
listen, it would say, you
must not live cut off
on top, faceless in a field.
there are other things to be.
reach out your arms, climb
the trees, see beyond me
then sing to me, weeping,
kissing your feet.

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