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
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.”
Were there a tear
To spare, where better
To be sure the gesture
Would linger than here
In its own little bottle
Blown from a hot bubble
To mirror a tear.
And were there more
Than one could bear,
So much the better
In the hereafter for
The begetter, a little
Vessel to stopper
Sorrow beyond measure.
And were there a tear
Too few, far better to hire
A weeper, for where
But in a tearful little
Jigger does it figure
No one need settle for
Less than a fair share.
There are fewer introductions
In plague years,
Hands held back, jocularity
No longer bellicose,
Even among men.
Breathing’ s generally wary,
Labored, as they say, when
The end is at hand.
But this is the everyday intake
Of the imperceptible life force,
Willed now, slow —
Well, just cautious
In inhabited air.
As for ongoing dialogue,
No longer an exuberant plosive
To make a point,
But a new squirreling of air space,
A new sense of boundary.
Genghis Khan said the hand
As a boy he had trouble speaking,
past three before a real word preened
from his lips. And for the longest time,
malaprops haunted him. His older sister
did what she could to train the bitten seal
of his brain to twirl the red ball
on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmother
tired of insisting he utter the names
of toys or foods — for every desire
was coded — and gave him whatever
he grunted and pointed to.
O, the man then a boy
thought, when I tower among them
I should invent my own speech
I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.
I’ d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding
the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,
though midway through
I’ d always tire,
and let night enter
like a silver needle,
sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,
but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose
when spring would arrive:
engineering an April
