1
song gives birth to
the song and dance
as the dance steps
the story speaks
2
the icy mountain water
that pierces the deep thirst
drums my fire
drums my medicine pouch
3
deep within my blood
a feather in the sky
foam on clear water
Tayko-mol!
4
free as the bear
and tall as redwoods
throb my blood roots
when spirits ride high
5
a valley ripe with acorns
and yellow poppies everywhere
as i stand here
dreaming of you
6
Ohdammit sez John I’m in trouble
so I sed why John?
John sez I got the bill for my insurance
and I haven’t got no money to pay it
cause I won’t get paid for swoking and bailing
Keith Guymon’s hay till next week
I done told him that would be just fine
when he ast a week ago but
LaVerne she went and opened the damn envelope
on a chain letter and I aint got no time
to write out twenty copies
I got to get that hay finished
so what am I posta do now?
I keep placing my hands over
my face, the fingertips just
resting on the place where I feel
my eyebrows and the fine end
of a bone. My eyes are covered
with the blood of my hands, my
palms hold
my jaws. I do this at dinner.
My daughter asks
Are you all right?
and by a common miracle
when I smile
she knows I am.
I ask her what she will do
after we eat. Sleep she
tells me. But I will clean
the deer skull, wash it.
The bad mother wakes from dreams
of imperfection trying to be perfection.
All night she’s engineered a train
too heavy with supplies
to the interior. She fails.
The child she loves
has taken on bad habits, cigarettes
maybe even drugs. She
recognizes lies. You don’t
fool me, she wants to say,
the bad mother, ready to play
and win.
This lamb who’s gone –
this infant she is
pinioned to – does not listen,
she drives with all her magic down a
different route to darkness where
In the land of milk and cream delivered early
and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care
about good grooming and, of course, news
of slurs and curs... Can it really be that home
becomes a place to be stranded?
“I don’t see a single storm cloud
anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,”
out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana,
where the answers and questions become identical
as evil twins.
Aluminum sky. Only November
Leaks into early frost
Like a ruptured jug
Of gas. I’d rather hold
Onto this road with pliers
Than have another face of you
Frisk my heart. Cool hands,
The touch of every moon
Is crucial and incomplete
As a sponge bath. Leaving
A backbone of lights
Behind me, a blinking string
Of pelts in fox country,
You hear the roadhouse before you see it,
Its four-beat country tunes
Amplified like surf through the woods,
Silencing bullfrog and red-tailed hawk,
Setting beards of moss dancing
On dim, indeterminate trees
That border two-lane blacktop.
Docked tonight, you reveal the badge
Of the farmer, that blanched expanse of skin
Where cap shades face, babyhood
Each could picture probably
with great care his brother drawing
the corded string of a watered silk bag
and mumbling to Basho above the keepsake
pay your respects to mother's white hair
now your eyebrows look a little white too
but all have turned instead to watch this child
a girl my daughter Simone
an astute migrant
skimming the stream of days
toted wherever she wants
Sunlight fades
the storefront full of magazines.
Month to month
they boss us — the covers,
they tell us
that if we want to get happy & alluring
(real happy, alluring sexually)
we must for goddamn sure
take up the breeding of Jack Russell terriers,
or else dig
ourselves
a little backyard fishpond.
Days of fish, days of dog, days of sex —
in that order, necessarily.
Now that everything seems so persuasive
you will go on changingas always
it has always been the case with you
whether you knew it or notever since
that morning in the swampthat Sunday
a sunless windy morningwhen
