Quincy Grass

One eternal morning of childhood, the sun begins
to sift haze above the Mississippi River

before trees grab the lowering light. Not far away,
in a small subdivision full of muddy lots waiting

for houses and supplying children with the dirt clod
that will, tomorrow, bust open one boy’s eyelid, a little girl,

the youngest of three children –the fragile, coddled one—
hunches in her pilled pink polyester nightgown over a small

fur-lined nest of baby rabbits at the bottom of the hill
behind her home. They look like the bottoms of her father’s

Sunday naptime toes, nestled tight: absurd toes
with closed eyes,  greasy transparent ears, tiny feet.

She gently strokes the back of each one. It is quiet.
Suddenly she is afraid. There is a stand of trees

behind her, shading where she squats in wet grass,
and beyond that, a long brick house holding her mother

vacuuming, or wiping from the kitchen table the dab
of milk beneath her cereal spoon, or looking out

the kitchen window above the sink, wondering where
Rachel has run off to. There she is. The girl pads barefoot,

panting openmouthed up the hill, through the sliding glass
door of the walkout basement, up carpeted stairs

into the dining room. “Mommy! There are baby bunnies!
They are pink!” Her mother folds the wet cloth lengthwise

three times and drapes it over the long silver faucet.  She insists
Rachel wear slippers. Together they walk across green lawn

around the trees. When she sees the rabbits tucked so helplessly,
obviously, into a burrow of grass in the middle of the yard,

she tells Rachel, “Don’t touch them, honey, so their mother
will come back.” And Rachel knows then that she has killed them.

She doesn’t tell her mother as they walk hand in hand
through the house’s shadow, back up the hill that is only large

because she is so small.  Later that afternoon, when she sneaks
out on bare tip toe to look at them once more, the nest is empty.

Her brow creases. She peers across the taller grasses beyond the edge
of lawn, but can’t see down deep. She studies the roots of the trees.

They are nowhere. Twenty nine years later, three days
after Rachel’s little sister dies of cancer, and before she is lowered

into a water-filled grave, her mother drives away.  The mud
is carpeted with two long rectangles of perfect sod.  Driving

past the old house with her three children, Rachel sees the hill
is only a gentle slope, though it once went down forever.

3 Oct. 2010

Becca’s birthday

two trees

I can feel the immortality of my grandmother’s crust
in the dough ball itself, marbled with shortening, the secret

of flakes and high cholesterol.  I split this weighty atom
in two, the first duality in the universe of pie: top and bottom,

wrapped in plastic, waiting in dark refrigerator to be rolled
from sphere to plane over mist of flour, then unrolled

over glass dish, rough edges jagged lace around the brim,
a waiting bed for cinnamon sugared apple wedges

skinned by a man who, after years drifting in timeless bliss,
stopped to hear I wish to eat from the tree of knowledge

and leave this.  But still I stay, and homeless Buddhists,
we make pie on Christmas. Green waxy apples abundant,

a tart and hearty mound rising above the rim, waiting
for pastry lid to unfurl like warm blankets over cold

kids smiling at mother, tucking them in. Rolling
and pinching the up and down fringe of doughy discs

into rope of thick crust, thumbs echoing Granny’s, just so,
making rippled ridge, a circular bridge to eternity.

I sip an ale and grin, my austere Lutheran grandmother never did,
and so the famous crust has changed in one detail: intoxication.

And another: a wind of Hindu mantras makes my heart
a sail, makes me slice with paring knife a Vedic vent.

Ancient om, so like a number 30 cradling one-eyed
crescent grin, a personal promise: 30 is when life begins,

when lines of sunshine smiling finally live, permanently,
in skin around my eyes, and Granny’s pie the key

to eternal life. From the belly of the oven pie is born.
I carefully pierce perfection with four lines, turn

the crusty wheel like prayer, offer Adam, weary with patience,
a steaming slice of the tree of life topped with mounds

of melted vanilla ice cream. “Well done,” he says,
“Well done,” with soft eyes.  And we nod yes.

2008

there is some life somewhere living itself without me.

there is some life somewhere living itself without me.
it is the one
in which my eleven year old son has never said you make me
want to kill myself.
it is the one
in which i always let stillness,
silence and spaciousness move, speak and think me.
it is the one
in which my lover knows  when we are done
with the lemon dill chicken, his doing the dishes means
thank you.
it is the one
in which he holds me in just this way
whether or not the children are around,
in order for me to meet
the next week a whole woman, not a woman of holes.
it is the one
in which i wake up, rise from bed with grace
and quiet mind toward sleeping children,
warm water, blue bowls of milk.
it is the one
beneath all this, already seeded, buried too deep in soil
to find light, or,
it is the one
sprouted, but i’ve forgotten where i planted it,
and the weeds have grown up so high i’m lost, parting leaves,
cutting my arms on blades of green, looking, looking.

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.