To Cry

for my mother on her birthday, March 2, 2014

When I was born huge through a difficult wound,
We both cried, Mother. True, I can only assume,
But it was you who taught me how to cry in love,
And having fallen in love with my own wet babes
One by one before I ever saw their god-faces,
I know you fell in love with me the way
I fell in love with you within your womb.
I must have cried to leave the heaven of your body
For this side, where there is always leaving.

As soon as we learn the child’s cry and pinky grip,
Memorize the length of milky limbs and even breathing,
The child grows impossible, perfect wings.
We celebrate the sky’s claim of our deepest being,
Wonder how our heart can wander earth
In so many bodies. For years, leaping our perch,
They return. But soon enough the child grows
Sky eyes, the strength of two decades, and hungry
For living, full of longing, perfectly plumed, flies.

Mother, I don’t remember crying when I left.
How can this be? I left you the way my daughter
Left me. Without a tear. I was not hurt. I believe
This means we have done the work of mothers well.
The child has learned to love himself, herself,
Saves money, buys a ticket to somewhere else.
I remember you crying the way my daughter will
Remember me, wetting her neck on the edge
Of her new life, she too excited to grieve.

Mother, now I return to you on the eve
Of your seventieth year, and it has been a week
Of restless sleep. I turn in the bed of my fifth decade
While you turn in yours one thousand miles away.
The snow tries to cover us both, promise spring.
All night for nights, hard years follow us like lost children
Tugging our shirts. We want to hold each one
On the dining room chair in the dark, let them cry it out—
The lonely fear, the empty purse, the sorry hearse.

We have stopped hoping tears will heal
Unreachable wounds. Some people say they should,
But such people were never loved by mothers like ours.
We know better. Let us bravely cry together, Mother,
Facing every bitter winter and hard-won May.
Let us cry that we are here in each other’s arms
Another day—in love with our children,
Our mothers, each other—we who have given,
And been blessedly given, so many birthdays.

Fortune Telling

Broken open, the fortune cookie says,
There are no short cuts
To any place worth going.

But I have cut many and cut
Short to leave him and him
And her and him
To get here.

The cookie may say,
Many short cuts
Make the path longer.

But I am here all the same,
Cut and brack,
Wild rose and blackberry,
Bramble scarred by sweetness.

Today we don’t brag scars
But salve them.
Make jam.

The long road,
The switchbacks
Go backward
Moving forward.

We know just where this leaves
Us, cancelling the length
Of the path.

2014

Indebted

My world appears solid.
Two decades of educational debt
Prairie rent, propane heat, the weight
Of this generation of apathetic students.
I learn to empty my head, any willing head
The way my sister learned to empty
Herself of self-eating flesh.

The day I told Citibank Rebecca
Was dead, the moneylender, startled, said
We are sorry. Could you please send
Us the certificate of her death?
And that is how it begins. Forgiveness
Of the middle class fantasy of wealth.

Just like that, the hounds she worked for, cried for
Scrimped, and in death’s room wrinkled her brow for
Became a short phone call, a piece of paper
In a file that couldn’t follow or define her
Success in death’s vaultless new world.

2014

Trouble

When Trouble came to visit
he limped into the open mic
with bourbon on his breath,
sweat in his shirt, a broken cane.

He took his seat, made himself
at home, planted long feet.
The room delivered prairie prophecies.
Quiet. White. No one yelled.

A woman took him home,
spread apricot on toast
to make him stay. He did.
And she unzipped that name.

2014

Geshe-la Speaks of Tibetan Geometry

Seven dust particles equal
one louse egg.
Seven louse eggs equal
one barley grain.
Seven barley grains equal
the length
of the thumb’s tip segment.

Twelve thumb tip segments equal
the tip of the elbow to the tip of the pinky—
not quite a cubit. Everyone’s cubit is unique.
Four cubits equal
an arm span.
One arm span equals
your height.

The measurements continue
up to the sun.
Tibetan Geometry
is a huge volume!
This thick!
Scientists don’t believe it.
Ha! Ha! Yes.

Nevertheless, five-hundred human heights equal
how far a conch sound travels.
Eight conch sounds equal
how far we can see, a distance we call paktse.
Eighty-four thousand paktse equal
the size of Mt. Meri, the central mountain.
Our globe is south of there.

Thus begins the Mandala of Universes:
twenty-five up,
twenty-five deep.
These fifty are one thing.
And one-thousand of these one-things
is one-thing:
The first of a thousand universes.

2014
With thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen

Home

The house packed up itself with my own hands.
I chanted mantras just to get me through.
For years I’d dreamed that any other land
would promise more than Brush, but now I knew
the house had commandeered my very arms
and learned to move— itself out of itself—
a dream that leaves a body in alarm.
Boxed books revealed my skin on every shelf.

Once I escaped the little town, the house
lived on as empty rooms of light inside
my mind. I’d close my eyes and try to douse
the ache with inner sky. I’d beg: Abide
in me a little longer, dreaming me.
But home is not a house turned body, see.

2014

New Love at Forty-Two

No babes will don our married faces
or lope about in borrowed limbs.
No lessons how to tie their laces—
no babes will don our married faces.
We’ll never teach them social graces,
watch them sink instead of swim.
No babes will don our married faces
or lope about in borrowed limbs.

2014

Sleepless Triolet

January digs up her dead
And ties their limbs to sticks with string.
Night dances them across my bed.
January digs up her dead—
Keen words I wish we never bred
Pirouette and, tangled, sing.
January digs up her dead
And ties our limbs to sticks with string.

2014

Reverse Galatea

Then, as the singing ceased and the lyre ceased, Down stepped proud Galatea with a sigh:

~Robert Graves

Make love to a poet
(illicitly)
and he will make you
dictionary
(fill lines with light)
pencil scrawl
(prop the sculpture)
pedestal
(sisters all)
his résumé.
You will be put on
display.
No one need know
your name
once you become
a dozen poems.
Try to walk
off the page.
Be a screen
he reads
while his life eats
oatmeal.
Your poems meet
secretly
to pound each other smooth.
Galatea’s mouth
spills his sea
without you—
a wary diction.

Dear Emmett Till,

They might
tell me
you’re not mine
to mourn—
white mother
of a white

fourteen year old son,

but sometimes
I hear your
bright whistle
in my lover’s
sweet brown eyes,
and, rivered,

everyone dies.

2014