Poetry

My hair was not on fire and the fabric of my shirt didn’t rub me the wrong way. It was the best day of my life when I entered the monastery. My heart was not on fire but enclosed by a high wall and covered with new grasses for the white cow who had taken…

I walk uptown with a letter in my head, past the piers and the languishing seals, the spiral of a spring day, landmark, harbor, inlet and bay; the ocean into more ocean, the gray of a gray sky. Dear God. Dear Absentee Landlord Who Collects the Checks. Dear Barbershop Glass and Barbicide Blue. Dear Recession…

Let the light be         yellow but not   candle-lit, quiet,         incandescent,   not cold yet         not bright yet enough to sting         the eye, close   enough to see         beside, clear   enough to read  …

In this borrowed house I keep my doors unlocked. A day in the middle of days where if not for worry I’d be alone. I’m cold as vodka. I dress myself back to warmth. Two dogs curl asleep downstairs. One gets up to align an invisible orbit then falls, graceless thud against hardwood. O marriage…

Greet the walker, walking in with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light. First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl strip a white notion near as wide. August, gone, feels gone. The woman in another room, ever without honeymoon, hits snooze and spreads her hair behind her like the patch…

Sundays my sister Mary and I’d split bags of penny candy in the junkyard after raiding each room of our trailer for loose change and Pepsi cans. Climbing through the interiors of gutted clunkers, we declared truces that wouldn’t last the day. Our lips puckered from flavors— sour patch, lemonhead, warhead, airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—…

A blackish hue clustered at our heels. You were in the mixed woods which meant I was in the same mixed woods. I kicked up the floor. Needles littered the lower air in standing dust, our shadows dotting the dirt mound sloped unnecessarily away. I peeled back in drying nut husks, upturned trunks of living…

   …even if all the animals are oracles, I don’t want to have a bee under my pillow, even if it’s just a sign of the druidic image of community, even if it signifies the solar dance of the bee replicating the hive of the many in the streets or the village, signified clairvoyants of ultraviolet…

for all the horses I didn’t get to ride the years of my girlhood in Montana. I wasn’t Terry Jo, the last child and only daughter of a rancher whose spread lay deep in the sheepland steppe, forty miles south of our little town. Terry Jo, whose mother, like all the ranchers’ wives, moved to…