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 firebut enclosed by a high walland covered with new grasses for the white cow who hadtaken up residence there. Each…

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

Let the light beyellow but not enough to stingthe eye, close enough to turnoff morning candle-lit, quiet,incandescent, enough to seebeside, clear after morning,to burn on not cold yetnot quite bright enough to readby, and just near absentmindedlyeach night

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

Greet the walker, walkingin with the shadow of the hood shooing away the emphatic light.First cold night the blinds flicker down, each vinyl stripa 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 patchof hillside shade I’ve come to…

Sundays my sister Mary and I’d splitbags of penny candy in the junkyardafter raiding each room of our trailerfor loose change and Pepsi cans.Climbing through the interiorsof gutted clunkers, we declaredtruces that wouldn’t last the day.Our lips puckered from flavors—sour patch, lemonhead, warhead,airhead, sour belt, jawbreaker—that named the failings of our mother’s men.We suffered them…

A blackish hueclustered at our heels. You were in the mixed woodswhich meant I was in the same mixed woods. I kicked up the floor. Needleslittered the lower air in standing dust, our shadows dotting the dirt moundsloped unnecessarily away. I peeled backin drying nut husks, upturned trunks of living trees,massive, deeply split. A bird…

   …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 ridethe years of my girlhood in Montana.I wasn’t Terry Jo, the last childand only daughter of a rancherwhose spread lay deepin the sheepland steppe, forty milessouth of our little town.Terry Jo, whose mother, like allthe ranchers’ wives, moved to townwhen snow closed the ranch roads,so her child…