Today you find yourself guilty
as the rim you split
an egg against
You press charges
You spell out your name
like the letters are medals
for good conduct in a bad war
The night moves in with you
into your room
until even your sleep
is not your own
Through the window
the grass tells you
to give up
and you are trying
but on the other hand
things keep you:
the moon, the cars, cars
You undress yourself
more deeply down
like this is the way
to get to the future
When my lover became my enemy
I made my bed amongst winds
and drove the old road ’ till my heart crashed.
Where’ s the bypass?
Washing my shirts, wringing them out.
Hung in the breeze.
Water skips
undressed
over outcrops.
What it says is.
Wind,
roots in rock.
Lying on Long Tongue,
sun diffused in mist.
Easy sleep
without waking.
The stems of the sun bent over the eye
The sleeping man
The whole of the earth
And this head heavy with fear
In the night
This complete hole
Vast
And even so streaming with water
The noise
The peals of little bells mingled with the
Clinking of glasses
And bursts of laughter
The head moves
On the carpet the body shifts
In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams are illuminated.
The white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins,
carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is
almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon — the hands are without shelter — as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.
Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells.
Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine.
We fill a pail with sand.
The day is robin’ s eggshell fine.
My mother’ s shoulder had three shallow scars.
Shining archipelago.
The quiet theaters of our lives.
Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow.
Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices.
Night sweats without monument.
The lake has the sea on its breath.
One man has an island.
All those poems I wrote
About living in the sky
Were wrong. I live on a leaf
Of a fern of frost growing
Up your bedroom window
In forty below.
I live on a needle of a branch
Of a cedar tree, hard-bitten,
Striving in six directions,
Rooted in rock, a cedar
Tree made of other trees,
Not cedar but fir,
Lodgepole, and blue spruce,
Metastasizing like
Bacteria to the fan-
Lip of a draw to draw
Water as soon as it slips
From the snowdrift’ s grip
It turns out there’ s a difference between a detail
and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is
mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’ s bicep
is an image because it moves when her body does,
even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun
on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code
on the back of another friend’ s neck is just a detail,
until you hear that the row of numbers underneath
I know that rarity precedes extinction,
Like that of the purple orchid in my garden,
Whose sudden disappearance rattled me.
Jane, in her way, is also beautiful.
And therefore near extinction, I suppose.
She is certainly rare and fragile of bone.
She insists she is dying, day by dubious day,
And spends her evenings looking at photographs
Of her mother, who never believed in love.
Rare Jane, I worship you. But I can’ t deny
You access to the endless
With its river of cold stars.
(there’ ll be days like this.)
— The Shirelles
These folks ’ bout to respect me into the grave.
At eighty Mama said, (mama said)
“People think you change when you’ re old
but you still got a girl inside.”
We’ ve come back to the site of her
conception. She calls it why
and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.
It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —
to live so the ghosts we were
don’ t trail us and echo.
I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.
The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.
But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe
