Poetry

Please don't take the cemeteries. We can't sleep when the dead fidget in air, their frantic fingers hushing the wind. We'll give bread, or pastures, even the trees tucked into themselves like frightened children. But please don't take the cemeteries. For each stone there is a blossom, a tear, an empty room where someone waits…

His wife folds her death bed—the waft of the sheets flutters through her lips. His name shifts on her face light as sun. Her snow-white mind is winter. This winter he gave himself absence. In the half- empty bed he knows his body. He whispers, “Life of the past.” He takes her to the north…

—C. G. Jung on archetypal dream imagery paradise gave me these legs      for spinning weep and pray and be joyful paradise gave me these legs      to weep and pray and be joyful when I have fixed each corner      p l i é relevé spin I start the silky spokes            p l i é relevé…

Her hand waves to dispel illusions. Insensitive to photons of light she doesn't stir for the clink of skeletons diving through. . . This one, the special one, proved the existence of sublimation aging on the sea-rocks, and there is no glimmer, no star-flash comparable to his lips, his intangible touch.

The water on the lake is still as love become permanent desire, like oil. The fields for hundreds of years fields of grass, potatoes, sugarbeets or wheat, are a graveyard where the stones look southward in a soft curve and the country road is a suburban street. Here my father lies dead by his own…

The night my brother died my father wrenched his own cracked, yellow molars from his mouth and went crashing like a wounded deer over the ridge and down, five miles through the brush, into Soda Canyon where the cops found him wandering, spent, around the burnt-out dance hall and brought him home. Bandaging his brush…

I first danced there on the warm linoleuin of our kitchen in my father's arms. Our hands clasped, feet scraping across the floor. I felt so comfortable with this, my first dance— as he led, and the music played on. The needle scraped in the final groove. I felt his grip release, our blood flow…

Our faces pored over his grave in benevolent incomprehension. He swims in his coffin like a diver watching the surface above—our faces small as petals breaking in the change of seasons. Our silence blooms rust and yellow, desperate as chrysanthemums. The cooler weather wears the bones in the body down to the heart.