Though I stormed the weathered
blood of her ancestors, I wanted milk
when I arrived. She promised food but
fed me iron. I starved. I dimmed into slack.
I wanted to be daughter and she said,
mother me. I was born in an asylum
of dawn, stream of light in my mouth.
I was transfixed by the pines
and all their green hands. On
ground blurred with dirt, quartz
gleamed like gristle. Now she nods out,
bent petals on stem, cratered leg crimson.
I tend the relics of her wounds.
I look up, gaze at the mountain moon,
then back, dreaming of my old home.--
-Li Po
Spring snow, cooled ash. You: first white gleam, then rubbled.
Bright seam of moon tended the burning creeks. Forest char, bone piles.
Trundle bed, basement. Your steam breathed a new sky, a
world dense as salt. Men knocked on the door. Singed skin.
A hinge opened up. Sprouts greened in your sludge. We
climbed your broken spine.
I saw we were bowls, holy. In your hands
the moon disappeared.
From Obsidian
Last night the Hunter's
Moon came looking for you.
She lit a wedding parade, boys
searching the street for a fix. Confused
by your death, your loved ones try
to marry each other. Are we only
bone, skin and urge?
I miss you more than ever.
We are flaying our way into
fall, breeding war horses
on the borders of sentences.
Your hawks migrate cliffs on the yawn
of canyon winds. Glossed with leaf
and moon, your rafted rivers, golden.
Under traffic, a sparrow clings lightly to blue tissue,
scooped for its nest in the poplar's bent, smooth body.
Wind pulses at the door all day. You cook meat
in a black kettle; its juices drool. My hungry body.
left you in the dream of a blue motel. Empty-handed
you began to dance, sang a song for everybody.
When is a comet a simple blurred eye of dust
and ice? This woman lives in a blanket, is somebody.
She is always looking for home. Wind has helped,
and lovers. They appear in night's deep body
and love her with the memory of brown wood and snow
in spring. The only home we know: ground, wind, this body.
Our home eventually blew down,
stained planks shattered
under the winds of his panic.
We held our jackets high
over our heads like bright sails
and tried to fly away. He lived
in the propane fumes of his van,
trash collecting under
its axled belly. Each day he called out
to his enemies, hunkered behind
the unkempt hedges. Yellow flowers
dared to bloom on those greening branches
at the perimeter of war, our homeless home.
Our small bodies airborne for only moments:
sewn as we were to that darkening battlefield
of our father's mind.
I wander among
small continents of pale green
lichen maps on stone
