Unless I Still

I’m always leaving even as I stay,
I told March wind, mercilessly
Tugging clothes’ loose ends,
Blinding me with hair.

It circled my clenched spine,
Made knees bend and bounce
Impatiently before it said,

The flag of who you think you are
Is always flapping and snapping
Against a dream of some better place.

You are like a dead leaf rattling
On a spring tree, unable to let go
Even while buds are breaking green.

If you let go, this place will fly;
If you hold on, deeper root.
Either way, the chill wind breathed,
You’re mine.

2015

Walking the Pasture

The night we walked
the two-pathed road—the one
you accidentally carved
in the pasture driving buckets
of corn and water drawn warm
from our winter bathtub
back and forth to three pigs
who skip and snort every time
your silver pickup climbs
the gentle hill and stops—
the farm light, as always, took over
where the moon left off.
Clouds crept in from the east.
We smelled but doubted rain.
We smiled but doubted this, our place.
Orion, in his simplicity,
pinpoints of restlessness shining,
hunted the western horizon
without finding it, shoulders lit,
chest filled with night.

2015

The Cross

When enough people die or begin
their descent in January,
walking a dark highway
into other people’s heaven,
or drinking childhood pain
to ashes, it’s enough to break
any woman of poetry.
I grow tired of pouring
my body into words.
It’s embarrassing. Absurd
to think they could hold me
like four urns on a funeral table
that will drive in four directions,
my flesh finally the cross without
the dead Christ metaphor.

2015

Garlic, Darling

I am chopping twice
as much for him.
My mother would recoil.
Enchilada casserole?
Pico de gallo?
Rosemary chicken?
Mole? Lasagna?
You’ll never see
him throw in less than six.
I stuff him full
of crushed cloves,
pickled cloves,
roasted cloves, minced.
We laugh territorially,
swap garlic grins.
What better proof
our breath and mouth
are only for the other’s
nose and lips?
He feeds me what he loves
and I return the service.
What better plan, he says,
to make a vampire sick?
O roaring garlic midnight!
O morning-after-garlic kiss!
Today we are sure
to live forever.

2015

Houses for Each Other

I’ve told any local who feels safe to tell,
These aren’t my people,
Though plains have fed me most my days.

And with the confession I push
Each listener away: You aren’t like me.
And what would anyone say,
Then, to offer comfort?

So I remain without people,
Restless, homeless at home
For over a decade.

My son’s favorite white rapper
Said this morning over bacon, sizzling
Deep inside his grin:
We are houses for each other.

Again I am confronted
With my own arrogant standing above
And apart from good people

Who have lived inside their lives so fully
They blink when I point at water
Where they swim.
Water, I say.

Why point at water?
I row across a great sea of sage
In a minivan every day—empty,

Except for me.
The sky is growing, and space.
I am trying to catch up, let everyone
Live in me. And leave.

2015

A Year after the Abortion

We thought the leghorn
and Greg Brown no longer laid.
Come look, my lover said.
Nestled in wall insulation,
its paper layer pecked
clear through, lay seven eggs,
four brown, three white
in the back of the shed.
Unsure how long they’d been,
though January and February
probably preserved them,
I smashed them in the run
and fed them to their hens,
who do not mind to peck and pinch
their unborn from the dead.

2015

What We Would Do

If the day’s promise were you cannot fail,
I would spend the day with you, son.
If you looked thin, I would prepare
A square meal without nagging you
To better consider your health.
You would not roll your eyes or lift your palms
In defense. You would eat. Everything.
Smiling, thanking me for loving you
With homegrown food. We would howl
At raunchy stand-up comedy, youtube hoot,
Make up our own horrible jokes
About dead babies. I wouldn’t scold you.
If we disagreed, you wouldn’t leave me
In the car, idling. I wouldn’t chase you
Down the dark street, beg you
To get in, come home, sleep where I know
You are safe. On a perfect day, you’d respond
To my texts, or call before bed,
And I wouldn’t think of cancelling your phone.
You would say, “Mom, I don’t blame you for life
Being hard or unfair.” I would say,
“It is only unfair if you imagine it
Some other way,” and you wouldn’t say,
“Stop being so philosophical.
Men don’t talk like that.” And I would say,
“Ok. Teach me how to talk
Like a mother to a man.”
And you would. And I would.

2015

Happy National Poetry Month!

In celebration of April's new weeds, poetry and my landing on planet earth 44 years ago, I'll try my darnedest to write a poem a day in cahoots with other NaPoWriMo dreamers. Please join us in the poem-a-day challenge by signing up here:

What We Could Not Let Go Of

It is the time my father’s voice
Begins to slur; my mother’s back and blood
Cannot move her, move slowly enough through her,
Without a knife, a pill, a corpse’s generous bone.
Death is not her friend but his, with its habit
Of gifting what is left of close and distant
Relatives. He never wastes a breath
On Death’s ill-timed greed.

He asked my sister Becca
For her new red Ford to give his favorite son.
She must have boiled to save it for her husband.
Thwarted even so, Death is not my father’s foe.
How else would he have made a life
Pulling the maimed from cars
Crushed by speed, houses charred
By pretty lights? It is all matter of fact.

My mother, though, is still a glass
Full of her daughter’s final glassy stare.
Every night she shatters sleep
With too long prayer and careful notes
On kitchen counters to be read
By the living and the dead in looping script.
Rebecca, I love you! last night’s note said.
Having just arrived alive by plane, I wasn’t jealous.

My own young sons already walk the house, divvy up
Their father’s guns, guitars, his father’s army
Knives. “Vultures,” he laughs. Perhaps.
Their urge is just as natural as burial in the sky.
The birds fly off with eyes and arms.
Our things, our larger bodies,
Feed our young what we once loved,
What we could not let go of.

24 March 2015

Until Something Escapes

The state hammers
You into palatable cliché,
A human gauge.

Oddness warps sharp angles
Inward like godless prayer,
A crushed cage.

2015