Strange Putty

Now there is something tired in my face,
in the shadows of my mouth,
so that even when I smile you
know I am lying.  I am
embarrassed of this, yet see this tired smile
in three other women.  We just smile
while under our skin and through our organs
cracks crawl.  We are frightened at falling
into the cracks, or worse, becoming them.
We don’t talk out loud about this.  We walk
down hallways and mountain trails
with mouths full of teeth that decay and crumble
in night dreams.  We wake surprised to run tongues
over them, planted firmly in flesh. We cry
and make love and make pancakes and poetry.
Perhaps these things are some kind of strange putty.
Or at least, in the mirror, we hope they are because we keep
doing them and haven’t fallen apart yet. A shaky hypothesis:
the mud dries, expands, and sends the cracks on in.

1998

Three Songs in E for Mojo

I.    In the mouth of an all-black and white-tipped dog
The morning on the mountain she tried to run off with my son’s placenta, recently buried under a pine seed, by then breaded black with soil, flapping up and down with every joyful bound of her puppy feet, I knew she had come to teach me about loyalty. Not her loyalty to me, which comes so easily, but mine to her after the slap of her eating a part of me, an aged organ I grew to feed a baby. That it fed her, too, made me snap into two sticks of anger.  I kicked her twice. I’m ashamed to say it now. Please forgive me. I had been too proud. But by the end of my then twenty-ninth year, her first, I had listened to enough stories to know she was cousin to Coyote and Raven, had come to pull the solid, serious earth of my birth ritual out from under me and laugh.  She dug up the mossy dark belief I had grown to grow me, the need for my body to be holy, and showed me that even I am only meat.

II.    Living her last life as a dog, a mirror
Eight or fifty-six years later, mornings in a plains town before heading to work and from three children, missing mountains, lost in the high desert of my own cactus longings, I’d sit on a round cushion trying to be in my life and breathe.  Mojo, amber-eyed, would sit crooked on her bad hip, a foot away, look me unblinking in the eyes, black nose wetting mine, and breathe, waiting in her own longing. To eat. To pee. For my fingers to find her waxy silk ears and knead.

III.    Also, because I nearly always forget the plastic sack
Now, more and more, instead of sleeping we walk streets.  Not alleys, where goatheads pierce her feet. Not sidewalks, where she is prone to stop hard and fast, so suddenly, miraculously heavy over scent, a leaden shadow over the base of neighbors’ trees.  Mojo, please! Come! I lean on the leash, my need to move outweighing her need to smell stale pee.  The street keeps us focused on walking, her toes clicking me back and back to here, to my smiling pink tongued midnight on a black leash. Here, to this small tarred street under almost stars. Here, to this god who has fed me her heart for eleven, for seventy-seven years, a bit short of leg for an almost lab, as Bhanu said, but lovely.

After reading Rosemerry's "Homecoming"

So lovely, this waiting to be scoured of longing.
May we never be. May the rain never come to rearrange us,
or may it come, and rearrange our longing, again and again,
sparkling like mica, calling us. Is it gold? Is it?
Are we fools? The answer is always, always, yes.

2009

angles

There is a bruise on the small
of my back under the AUM.
This morning, on the way

to watch my son wrestle,
as I settled into the seat set
at the relaxed angle you

chose last evening, it ached, tender,
and I grinned at our own gentle
wrestling with waves of hunger,

time’s currents, and soft
cries pressed against buckles.
Alone, my mouth reaches

for your name over and over,
the sound that came
through your lips teaching

mine to say s as sh.
I would multiply your name
by all the words I know

to understand the ways sound
has arranged you into such
beautiful whispered angles.

Lend me your mother tongue,
love, and I will bend into them,
a curled sh into your sh.

2008

lost in bed

Some mornings before tea,
Tai Chi, sit-ups or cereal,
the bed reclaims the head,
and the head keeps talking

about novels that seduced
and left you lost, lovers
who once seduced, whom you
left lost, and your head

lost in a labyrinth of sweetgrass
that moved underground and sprung
from where you first planted it
in the wrong bed,  and your own bed

lost for almost a month, your hands
helping your hungry belly remember
this is how he touched  and found
you outside your head.

2009

Tapihritsa/Liberation

When the thing you wanted becomes the thing
you don’t want, and the thing you didn’t want

becomes the thing you want, you begin to see
problems do not live in things, but in wanting

and not wanting.  If you could throw away
your jewelry, let down your long hair, burn

your clothes (you’ve seen blue jeans burn red)
and sit unadorned in your own invisible colors,

all things could dance through you without a snag.
You would almost smile, but not quite, and the mouths

of the earth would pray to you for insight. You
would grant nothing and everything. The two

are the same in the way wanting and not
wanting are the same.  It is best to simply offer

your utter nakedness to those who
wear the clothes you left behind.

On the way home

My mountains are these clouds.
Treeless fields of sage
my high desert sea.
Each pry the same opening.
The gap that spreads quietly
as late August yellow,
refusing to entertain
but claiming me.

another way of looking at a black bird

-for the raven over Pearl Street and especially Karen Chamberlain

After thirteen years,
I finally understand
the raven’s word.

Awe! Awe! Awe!

Look! Isn’t that the sun
it carries in its beak?
Isn’t that the dawn
in my own dark belly?

In the beginning was a school bus

From one of its olive green Naugahyde seats
an 11 year old girl’s belly—
while trying to imagine her own
insignificance despite her Christianity—
disappeared into endless space,
into the place that holds all things
but is not held by anything else.

Her eyes fluttered.  Bouncing in the seat
over pot holes brought her belly back,
a nausea. When the bus stopped,
she walked out of its metal walls,
across the street, into the dry-walled walls
of her own home with the hidden key
under the railing. She turned on the tv.

2009

If I put the camera down, I see

My boys try on attitudes
of bodies in water.

The newly eleven on the diving board,
a slight hesitation, a running to the edge,

a throwing of flesh into whatever
molten star shape five limbs can make

before smacking water, before mouth
flashing light, before Awgh!

Next, the monk waddle. Hands
in prayer at breast,

then the innocent fall.
And the almost eight sits quietly

astraddle the alligator’s eyes
while bigger boys climb and pull.

He is proud not to fall off, jaw set
to stay astride while they battle,

cheeks pinching nylon, peeking
out from trunks. He hugs low,

alligator jockey, ear plugs
still in place, protecting tubes,

his last two. The others float
see-through somewhere in the pool.