Poetry

When we lived in the blue house
the baby woke every morning
before light.

Parting: from your perspective on the train, from mine
on the platform. I claim your clocks tick slow, are out
of sync with each other. We agree that my clock
struck noon, just not about when my noon happened.

A rifle on my shoulder, I am in the henhouse again.
The scream is one pitch too high for human. The weasel
is a white scarf at her throat, pas de deux of feather and fur.

Dessicated and abandoned,
they lie on the window sill
above the kitchen sink. Each morning,
the sun shrivels the clinging flesh
as they wait

Once upon a rosebush, her body
snared in thorns.

How have I come to be trapped here? Whose curse have I aroused?

It was I, said the fallen willow,
stiff & dry as a bone.

Because I carved my name in your flesh?, she asked & it nodded.

At first, she’d been glad the cats had survived,
setting out what little milk she could find
to draw them close. Now, their glowing eyes
in the dark unnerve her more than the lights

that flicker on & off inside the charred,
abandoned houses or the ragged sounds
of buzzards squabbling in blackened backyards.

The plainer girls once told you
you were lucky—

your fair skin, the bowing of your lips—

Who resigned the rabbit to such blinking
silence when squirrels are given a stridency
that overwhelms the stuttering finch,

drowns the pulse of the worm’s twin hearts
undulating the length of its body. …

Are we fish or birds? If we are born
gilled, then surely a winged rebirth awaits us,

no longer earthbound, our animal
slits sealed over, sealing out
knowledge of what
came before. …

I. With Clouds

That year, whole seasons collapsed
around us. We were shirt-sleeved and suddenly
pummeled by storm. I prayed to be kept
fog-encased and unaccountable, out
of morning’s throat. …