Each grief has its unique side.
Choose the one that appeals to you.
Go gently.
Your body needs energy to repair the amputation.
Humor phantom pain.
Your brain cells are soaked with salt;
connections fail unexpectedly and often.
Ask for help.
Accept help.
Read your grief like the daily newspaper:
headlines may have information you need.
Scream. Drop-kick the garbage can across the street.
You plan an uncomplicated path
through Colorado’ s red dust,
around the caustic edge of Utah’ s salt flats
a single night at a hotel
in the Idaho panhandle. Our plans change.
It’ s spring, we are two Indian women along
together and the days open:
sunrise on a fine long road,
antelope against dry hills,
heron emerging from dim fields.
You tell me this is a journey
you’ ve always wanted to take.
You ask me to tell you what I want.
Live jazz at El Fresco is one guy, electric plinks,
until he turns off the switch, closes his eyes,
and warbles a boy’ s tenor, wood-flute tones,
pure séance hymns from before Christians.
Rowdies at the bar stop fighting and stare
as seawater washes through the room,
seeping through floorboards to serpent dens.
The chorus stirs spirits from family lore.
Desmond, Big Miller, James MackGehee —
all rise from steerage and sing with the lords.
I look through glass and see a young woman
of twenty, washing dishes, and the window
turns into a painting. She is myself thirty years ago.
She holds the same blue bowls and brass teapot
I still own. I see her outline against lamplight;
she knows only her side of the pane. The porch
where I stand is empty. Sunlight fades. I hear
water run in the sink as she lowers her head,
blind to the future. She does not imagine I exist.
The twilight of your face,
the unknown bird in your voice,
draws me again to your eyes’ green vision,
your song about that longest
moment, a moon vulnerability,
a Natalie I saw alone,
at Carolyn’ s party years ago,
where you called me to your side,
and I held my heart, cupped in shadow,
as an offering to your smile,
our soft-spoken isolation.
The stars grow lemon
in the field, spread
like tea leaves in
a cup; red-wing
blackbirds fold themselves
into the fence,
corn dreamers.
The sky undulating
with clouds returns
gold-throated arpeggios
to the one walking
at sunrise, sunfall.
Light as the air
I sit on my
cottage steps;
a tom cat come
home to die for
the day.
Filled with old lovers, in the clutch of the chair,
you are a bloom of uncombed hair.
With a collection of roses, bowls of mashed petals,
I make a clear cup of sky.
Fold away clouds. Roll up blankets of blue.
I am a body of empty husks.
Indian corn is in your hair, the tassels,
the pollen, fertility.
Indelible ink is tattooing our lungs.
We speak smoke.
We exchange our lunacy for reverence.
Respect tornados.
Windy Woman. Four Winds.
We have extended the edge of expectation
by merely living.
The buildings are worn.
The trees are strong and ancient.
They bend against the grid of electric lines.
The windows are broken
by the homeless and the cold past.
I am home on the yard
that spreads mint, pales the Victorian roses,
takes into it the ravaged lilac tree.
The black bulk of plastic lies about
stopping unwanted weeds for the Landlord.
Tattered, the cedar tree is chipped to dry heaps of recklessness.
The unwanted spreads by the power of neglect.
The wear of traffic says that we are out of time,
A meadow brown; across the yonder edge
A zigzag fence is ambling; here a wedge
Of underbush has cleft its course in twain,
Till where beyond it staggers up again;
The long, grey rails stretch in a broken line
Their ragged length of rough, split forest pine,
And in their zigzag tottering have reeled
In drunken efforts to enclose the field,
Which carries on its breast, September born,
A patch of rustling, yellow, Indian corn.
Beyond its shrivelled tassels, perched upon
The topmost rail, sits Joe, the settler’ s son,
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’ s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
Glint through their mildews like large cups of gold.
Among the wild rice in the still lagoon,
In monotone the lizard shrills his tune.
The wild goose, homing, seeks a sheltering,
Where rushes grow, and oozing lichens cling.
Late cranes with heavy wing, and lazy flight,
Sail up the silence with the nearing night.
