For my mother
In the pueblo of the body, the body of mud
and sticks, rain gets in, structures dissolve,
what isn't supposed to happen does. Stranger
cells invade houses of milk, a woman descends
into anesthetic silence, sews a quilt from petals
of her body. Tonight something holds me here,
makes me stay inside what hurts. Islands pass by
and I run a treadmill towards them--wish for
the somewhere I am not, for the absent, for the lost.
As the scars heal over, she will grow a garden, a green
room of vines and sunlight. We will walk without shoes
counting breaths, sleep naked with grass between
our toes. We will bare the instruments of our bodies
to the moon and say play, we have nothing to hide.
(First appeared in Many Mountains Moving, Fall 2006)
Because a woman asks for change
and I look through her like an x-ray,
her thin brittle bones my own.
Because the boy's boat in the fountain
drifts back and forth without wind,
and the smell of bread in the air
is like the sexing of bodies.
Because I wear a pebble in my shoe
to remind myself to live live live
like a lizard unfreezing itself
from the net of a great shadow.
Because I hold a dying rabbit--
neck just snapped by jaws,
heat pouring into my hands
until I, too, have lost my boundaries.
Because when the starlings lift
from the elm, I hear my own words
shake down over the greening earth like salt.
(First appeared in Bellingham Review, Fall 2003)
i.
What binds us is heat,
the taste of fire on the tongue.
What binds us is breath,
the push pull, one lung
into the other. Inhale.
Exhale. The push pull of a child
breaking through the bower
of the mother to drink first light,
to hear the sound paintings--
brush strokes of words moving
like tiny hands through grass.
ii.
My child toddles towards me
calling my name over and over. It could be
any word, his name for the world now.
Sometimes a voice like his breaks into a dream
where flowers grow beneath ice and his face
never changes. Then he shifts,
turns from babe to boy to man.
A seam presses us apart,
quivers, almost breaking.
iii.
Look. The story awakens in the body.
These hunks of hands fall on each other. The young
eat apples, sift sand, and in time punch flesh,
twist wool into yarn, turn their palms
to the night and ask why.
The leeks in the garden grow globes of flowers.
Everything reaches now, turning to dizzy seed.
I want you to listen to the cadence of wandering light,
to the way our bodies angle towards it. Can you see
how our faces are burned from looking back?
iv.
And then my boy says ball, ball, ball,
with this first word, undifferentiated, the round shadow
flying away from the earth, disappears into the sun.
(First appeared in New Delta Review, Summer 2002)
One day inside a magnet
a machine spoke to me in pulses, shifted neutrons
to make images--then I saw it--
a growth in my brain--the cross-sections
of lobes like butterfly wings, or the shapes
of storm clouds over curves of land.
I wanted to touch the thin cushion
of the dura between skull and cerebrum, that moat.
And that dark mass nestled
inside the pituitary,
where chemicals flash to jump-sweep
through bloodstream, tell the body how to grow,
when to go fertile, how to stop the bleeding,
when to soften the stalks of our bones.
That night, I dreamt the lamp
of the surgical table, the scalpel that cuts
the tissue away, as if to unhook a miscaught fish--
the doctor leaning over, saying
you do not have to die for this. And I waking
to this same flesh of wind and wire, this skeleton
of holes and starlight--to watch my own unpiecing,
to feel the dredge of adrenaline in the blood.
That morning the earth was violet with crocus,
snowmelt painting the valley with first green.
I watched the world pour through
to shift sand, cleave bedrock, dissolve the calcified--
felt it drive into my body, break the husk
so I could remember how to bloom.
(First appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fall 2006)