Poetry

                                                 I wonder what                                                            the smoke of a                                         dead swan’s body                                                          smells like.                                            Like the wind through                                                  a keyhole from                                      a different century.                                                   Like my dead                                            mother’s jacket, wet                                                   from rain and                                                             bombs.                                              Sometimes, I find a                                                    raindrop on its sleeve.                                           Some mornings, smoke                                                     rises from                                                            the collar.                                                    How a body                                         obediently burns                                                    …

The tree crew has come,restored a long-vanished view of the mountain.My eyes are again thirty-two. My life is still seventy-one. My life is startled.  It lifts, as the many heads of a herd of horsesall at once do, hearing a sound. Heads raise, ears raise, to listen. How used it had grown to only the smallest of…

Witches, witches believe, revolve like pinwheels.Sparks of ripe inner thoughts whirl out as witches. Gather close, furry creatures in my household,two familiars, but not as stout as witches. Once, I rode on a bike down sleeping mountains,never knowing my riding routed witches. Branches bearing her birds respond with waving.Breezes sneakily dish about the witches. Bring…

The nights grow longer. I go to bed at nine, like a kid, tired by eight.It is fall. No leaves, some early snow. I post a picture of the gate under lamplight, our little park behind it, cars          out front.I read the news. We microwave our food. In the dream within a dream: a love note,…

It’s not safe to be a woman You come into a world of wantand to want yourself,you got to get in line behind all the other hungry mouthstheir names for youthe hooks of a bramble you go to water every daybecause everyone still needs to breathe You carry the water from eternityfrom ever sincefrom behind…

No one believes she suffers. But it seemsTo her to be her skeleton, the thingOn which the basic meat of everythingHangs, everything important anyway, from dreamsOf flying to the fear of ruin—selfTo blame, or target of another’s aim.No one remembers that she changed her name.She sets her lively brain up on a shelfInside a jar…

The day will come when someone will not be able to make the final entry.Beloved, beloved, beloved, the day’s ink will say—In every direction, thickets of least and magnitude sang.Apples sweetened. A hummingbird stood mid-air on its wings.Even the fires of hell, beloved: they could be felt.

Hold me, Earth, like a mother. Make your natureheal me, dirt, with an orange sweet potato. Slide my sorely inept red cells some ironbeans and berries, and feed my crooked fingers milk of grief, if they need it. Cry like rainstorms,sigh like gusts from the high, high distant mountains, shape your clouds as they wash…

From Sor Juana: A Canticle, a Soratorio                                       across a gap of centuries how dare    be field poet?    & live in a nun’s cell?                                         in charge of theorem                                     under subordination that you come from far                                      anthropomorphic, bride of Christ                                                       that you muse  &  make noise, study & be poet     that you carry proverbial bundle, Sor Juana, of books on your back of what?              of…