Poetry
September 2008, Vancouver
In a single fluid motion,
the officer steps within
the panicked mother’s reach,
taps the stun gun
against her ribs,
and scoops her sick
infant into the crook
of his arm.
How do you justify
mating lightning
with motherhood?
You ask why
I love you.
For this:
You are
a minute
of quiet
in a loud
shouting
world.
A survey of conquered lands:
fifteen telephone poles, three
valleys, and the wire skeleton
of a fence line an acre back
from the curve of the porch.
Seven feet a week, when the
weather’s right: humid enough
for the vines to suckle water
right out the August air. Drought
can’t kill it, just makes it sleep,
twisted, drying in the Alabama sun,
until the clouds give back the rain,
and its endless gnawing march
resumes. Burn it if you like:
set fire to the vines and watch
flames curl up hillsides like
shedding leg hair with a match,
but all that does it make it
a little more eager to sprout.
Here’s a secret to keep your head
afloat under the encroaching tide:
kudzu’s worst nightmare – a pair of
small white goats.
I want to kiss her after kissing her,
and before, and while kissing her,
I thirst to kiss her again:
I fear all this kissing will crack my lips open
and I will spill words onto her tongue:
You are the water and jug
and I thirst and I thirst.
but first I will kiss her
and shepherd sweet words
over the hills of our mouths,
You are the smoke and the salt,
preserve me, preserve me
so she will kiss me and kiss me,
and this poetry isn’t free,
it’s bartered from me
with the moist of her lips,
the clip of her tongue as it slips
into me, an offer of moisture
for the roots of my poetry,
for the tangling roots entangling me.
I want to kiss her after kissing her,
and before, and while kissing her,
I thirst to kiss her again.
The daydreaming archaeology intern
doesn’t really wish a giant stone ball
would chase him back to the leaking
trailer-laboratory, but a noir beauty to
kiss his bruises (just a few scrapes
on the knuckles from careless brush-
stroking, really) might be nice.
Brown felt fedora, tumbled scruff,
obligatory Nazi goons…
On second thought,
rusty antebellum nails in the Alabama clay
aren’t likely to melt your face in
a flashy show of divine wrath,
so maybe this gig ain’t so bad.
Since your leg is broken
and you cannot easily go out,
I have brought the garden
into your bedroom.
I have emptied your
chest of drawers of your
underwear and your shirts
and filled it with clean
black soil, with explosions
of yellow red chrysanthemums,
clustered bellflower,
stalks of bright snapdragon.
There are sunflowers
standing in the closet
where you hung your
summer dresses
(it was the only place
the sunflowers would fit.)
It has taken me hours
to cover the floor with
dark sweet earth and
fill the carpet with
fresh shoots of grass
(yes, I even brought
the green beetle,
the wriggler earthworm,
the polka-dot ladybug,
because I know
how you love them.)
Be careful with the
wisteria hanging over
the bed. It is tacked up
only precariously,
but it was a necessary
final touch.
I could fill hot air balloons
with the heat of this emotion.
Orange balloons, blue balloons,
rainbow striped balloons
soaring over green hills
and your small white house.
Look up, I’m waving down at you.
Here’s a rope ladder.
Climb up, sit next to me
in this wicker basket
and we’ll chase the sun
even as it dips under the earth.
Even if it escapes us,
even if it grows dark,
we’ll float along under
every rich star in the sky,
but if you want to reach them,
you’ll have to kiss me.
Burn a little hotter, hotter,
and promise the atmosphere
we’ll come back down soon
(a promise we don’t have to keep)
and fill our arms with as many
stars as we can hold.
Bite into one like a fruit:
juice like light on your tongue
but I taste that every time
my lips meet yours.
Your face,
eight feet by nine
on sanded willow,
could devour me.
I am caught up
in the breadth
of your lips,
in the pigments
chosen to depict
your skin.
I have been standing
here for hours,
simply staring,
when the museum steward
pauses on a tour,
says “She always
find admirers.”
Here I am.
Here am I.
I hear A.M.:
the fizzle-crack
of sunlight bursting
seeds in the soil
of these sleep-thick eyes.
I am here.
I am here.
Here, ami,
Tend my roots with your trowel-blade.
but nick no worms–
they are innocent.
Ah, me, here
is the gavel-truth:
these flagstones are a penance.
The moss on my lips the bailiff.
I am here-
by sentenced, juried by worms
and judged by blossoms
bursting from my flesh.
Foxholed together,
I taste soot on his stubble.
Don’t ask and don’t tell.