My love, you blot out the stars And I in my arrogance Will dream that I brought you here Your fingerprints on the window Your laughter shakes the walls We are playing airplane I am the child caught On your knees, mid-flight, watching The ghost of a distant leviathan crest Beneath the waxing moon |
In the back of my head beneath the rug There lives a stick-thin spirit called guilt. He raises hell on knobbly knees whenever I fall short And gets along with his neighbor the old woman, regret and her hound dog, judgement Guilt is nervous and solitary He will not eat unless I remember to leave a bowl of rice, an offering, at his doorstep We will make an agreement, he and I Because I must love him, too And love is sometimes an armistice Because if I shut him in alone He will gnaw the bed, the chairs, the wall until he is all there is left of me |
I feel a kinship With the cat Who stands on the threshold Neither in nor out Because it wanted to poke Its nose in Without entering And who, once inside, Wishes to leave. Cats are threshold creatures There they dwell And may cross at will; The only thing That might be dead and alive At the same time Until someone opens the box. |
I envy the communism of ants They know exactly where they're going Brave little guys Scouting out the counter inch by inch I watch them touch antennae In their long twitching service lines (As a child I was sure that they had secret passwords so they would know which anthill they belonged to) Every one like the next, sexless, intrepid I don't think they ever get lonely. |
Winter was made to permit your sorrows Let your wounds amass like cloistered snow I cup in my hands the tap water blessing The sullen sweet of cooking acorns The bitterness leeches out |
There is rain falling on my porch There are bombs falling on Gaza I am watching it in yellow streetlights I am watching the horizon glow of Gaza burning Filmed across the sea The sun has set here, I taste chocolate and I will wake in the morning To grey skies Soon the dawn will break in Gaza Where the sun will be greeted by raging fires And the dead and the dead. |
I felt it on your off-white walls Burning from your old flourescent cieling lights In whimpering candlefire and The kiss of dusk on spent storms It refracts in miserable cobblestones, anemic lampshades, Poorly bleached hair and last year's sweaters and one lonely pair of hanging shoes. The snow by contrast is stark and white Betraying its newness on the aging stones And I saw that it's a winter color Not like buttercups or wine Summer is for golden things, Not books unbound by time Or faded coats, stone walls at dusk, Or wan and pale faces. Crosswalks marred by city slush reflect the sky from underfoot The last dead leaves of summer trees beg you to let the beauty dig you out Flurries frozen midair by light that whispers holy, holy, holy |
I do not know Desire We have hardly met. I could not pick her face out in a crowd. All I know is that there must be someone, somewhere Who will come with me to the desert at the end of time, When all of the lawns have died of thirst And all the plastics, digested by pill bugs. I imagine the falling days Bringing sweet rain, And I could not bear to watch it alone |
I will never begrudge a rainy day The sky understands That she, too, must close her eyes from time to time To sleep, or to weep over dry lands Green things are greenest in the rain And the pavement can smell of earth The air is soft, forgiving These days are meant to be taken lightly; Others roll by with the weight of ages The revolution of the seasons The fungal rebirth of the leaded sun But on days like this even the unknowable must lay her brow on the earth To breath it in and remember what it means to rest |
Cottonwood grove-- Where the desert lets down her hair smells of damp sand unusually wet roots, wood in water Reawakened moss Pinpoint sand rubies in quartz and silicate Granite by the creekbed worn to a metate to grind the acorn ancestors of the tree that shades our lunch Leached in a creek that must have been running With summer rain or winter melt An oak can live three hundred years; A saguaro two hundred they may well remember |
Easy to grow obsessed with the after because it passes over the in-between The violence, the cataclysm, the apocalypse Rapture is usually scheduled We meet an appointed doom Togeter, or alone, dealer's choice-- Let me look at my calendar If time is never the same river twice We are swimming upstream And I am casting flies from a rowboat in the swimming hole Revolution is not a fish. |
In a jar on the shelf in my kitchen Are last year's linden flowers Dried but sweet-smelling And sometimes I am reluctant To nourish habits Equally so, reluctant To nourish myself. Even if the flowers I gathered last summer, in fragrant June From the waiting arms of Earth And dried so patiently Are just sitting there, waiting A lover's gift deferred By arrogance and drought Until I wake up one morning With a tremor in my bones And the world closing in on me And I force myself to make tea What could it be but a gift? And what could I offer in return, To the uncountable ancestors who learned, with the trees, To make one another whole |
Did you know that pomegranate seeds make a dye bluer than indigo? Osage, weld, and gorse, as gold as the sun The masters of Rome burned cities for Tyrian purple; purpurea, they called it, the waves rising A head-turning girl in sappanwood magenta, with her long black hair, turns down the village road; Claret green and cochineal red No corner of our world In all of time Has foregone color. |