A chicken soup for the rainbow lover’ s soul.
A chicken soup for the lover of chicken soup.
A carnage of birds, a devastation.
Chicken soup for the dried-up garden —
It’ s been a lousy summer sucking us dry.
Chicken soup for the grocery list.
Chicken soup for unwanted potatoes.
Chicken soup for extinct animals.
To cure a child of rickets, split a living
ash tree down its length and pass
the child through
(naked, headfirst, three times).
Seal the two halves of the tree back up
and bind them with loam and black
thread. If the tree heals, so will the child.
(The child must also be washed
for three mornings in the dew
of the chosen tree.)
All my stories are about being left,
all yours about leaving. So we should have known.
Should have known to leave well enough alone;
we knew, and we didn’ t. You said let’ s put
our cards on the table, your card
was your body, the table my bed, where we didn’ t
get till 4 am, so tired from wanting
what we shouldn’ t that when we finally found our heads,
we’ d lost our minds. Love, I wanted to call you
so fast. But so slow you could taste each
letter licked into your particular and rose-like ear.
You wept in your mother's arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’ re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’ s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.
They are skimming the lake with wooden hooks.
Where the oak throws its handful of shadows
Children are gathering fireflies.
I wait in the deep olive flux
As their cries ricochet out of the dark.
Lights spear the water. I hear the oak speak.
It foists its mouthful of sibilants
On a sky involved with a stillborn moon,
On the stock-still cottages. I lean
Into the dark. On tiny splints,
One trellised rose is folding back
Its shawls. The beacon strikes the lake.
I have seen the arrested
shrub inform the crag with grief.
Lichens crust the rocks with red.
Thorns punctuate the leaf.
Sorrow is not a desert
where one endures the other —
but footing lost and halting
step. And then another.
I wish we could control this revolting
want of control: these people
with their spongy eyes, their mouths
of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises
and bear traps for vulvas.
One taste of sunlight and at once
they can’ t do without it. Water,
the same, and food, and air,
and a dozen other squalid habits.
Some — like their copulation,
a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck —
are not physically compulsive but
the partners can’ t stop wanting them to be:
so we desire to be raped
Your parents had reached a long slow time,
as animals do, the great center of their lives,
when they gleam in their fells as though eternally,
unchanging. Or as a day can seem eternal
if you lie and watch the full clouds, conscious
of your own time: you soon must get up and leave.
So father, mother, the small shabby town,
its patch of earth going on as though forever: you
forgot them there, where they’ d been since you started out
and where you could find them again — as anyone
forgets what he has to lean on
Child
one with the sun
in trackless fields
of yellow grass and thistle, scent
of humid heavy air and the wing music
of bees and flies.
Child, slender
nakedness to itself unknown,
true colour of the light
dispersed invisibly
or glowing around the black hulls
of distant thunderheads, around
the grasshopper’ s countenance,
solemn, vigilant and wise.
