Winterscape

It is not without a certain sense of quiet comfort I am now writing by moonlight reflecting off the snow sown field in front of me.

The steeply banking hills that surround us hold their bristled pines like candles. The white roofed cabins that speckle this open valley boast only porch lights and the heavy glow of a humble Christmas tree.

As I sit here and watch the light shiver in sequined snow, I can't help but think back to when my mother and I made similar villages: cotton for the landscape, tin foil for the backyard brook, small twigs for the now naked trees.

How silly we were to think the villagers would not notice the metallic water and the un-melting snow.

How mystified we would be if we saw as I see now a small snake of smoke, air slithering to the mountains.

Apocolypse

We are old enough now
To say we were young
When our hands couldn't put the light down.

We are young enough now
To say not long ago
We wore our age like a crown

And though you've moved on
I'm still here to hear
New hooves on this echoing ground.

Attending Graveside

I've put you away
Like splinters, like jam,
Like the old Christmas tree.

I've hidden you in small brown
Coffins, buried you in my
Little upstairs sepulchre,
Bare bulb and knotted string.

And when I visit you,
I will not lay flowers or bells.
I will lay broken bits of branches
Planning soon, to see this pyre blaze.

Religious Roundtable: A Place Setting

His studdering Islam
wrapped in a thick Turkish tongue
Is being set like 5 fragile teacups
Near our unwashed feet

His calculated Buddhism
tumbles quantitatively into four tined poetry
placed between breaths
on it's paper thin heel

His mahogany Catholicism
folded as a seven necked swan
sits wingless, its feet buried deep
in scabless wounds

His lidless Protestanism
rolls slowly from a side-chewed cheek
and falls like a paring knife
grazing both palms

His untranslated Judaism
hops one-footed about the room
Until he lays down, a spoon,
Too deep to fully taste

And I am still uncomfortable
waiting among this china and cutlery
for the first taste of meat or wine.

One of those poems

She glitters like disease

like harlequin eyes

like a volcano dance

She holds Africa like a slice

of apple at the back

of her bark covered throat

She keeps straw and orchids

by pillow so sleep is travel

and every morning is a violent un-burial

She is pancakes and sand,

a silent infection, the moon

as it splits the septic sky

She is quietly blurred,

a bloody Cinderella holding

apocalyptic peace in her

happenstance hands

What I'm learning

It turns out that "The Fifth Element" and "Total Recall" are actually terrible movies.  If these new recognitions are mile signs on the long highway of adulthood, I'm getting off at the next exit.

I've been hiding from this for quite some time.  Planting pens and pencils in the garden of my desk, using loose scraps of paper for soil.  I've been letting the ink dry, letting the lead dull. Doing what I can to put poetry in a corrugated field behind me.

But early this morning, tending tall stalks of education and responsibility.  Cutting my arm on their blade thin skin.  I noticed in the valley of a row, a small bud was bursting.  Peeling its four leaf frock off I saw colored shadows.  Not a mirror of what we are, but color enough to denote what we are telling ourselves to be.  Holding the fruit like a tiny crown I sat beneath a hollow oak.  I was so absorbed with taking small bites of my new royalty, I didn't notice the ants as they slowly built their mound around me.

Egg hunt with Malice

I hid it in the yard
beneath the wysteria
coiled like a snake
behind the perpetually falling flowers

I buried it in the sand
along the driveway
I buried it like a body
limbless and cold

I balanced it on the high branch
of a knobby oak
it sat unsteady, afraid
it's feet wouldn't reach the floor

I placed it beneath a stone,
saw a small crack,
heard its 17th century Salem
whisper, "more weight"

I put it in your hand
gold and glittering
waited until I could see
the nails rising from your palm

A Reponse to Jason Ballard

He spoke in strings
that tied our eyes
like windless kites
to his pregnant tongue.

He whittled words
from softwood scripture,
licked splinters, and
sighed alabaster sighs

He coughed out poems,
novellas, whole volumes,
collected works. The books
fell to his feet and in the fire

the billowing smoke then formed a wind
that blew the bulbous kites from our skulls.

Riverbed

I want to feel how real
this muddy bottom is.
i want to dagger my toes
and sink them deep in its
watery womb. I want to
feel how real the fish
are on my skin, wear them
like diamonds, like fur.
I want to be eased
by the un-treed breezes that
shift and groan dsown here, that
bend and moan down here.
I want to hear the silence
beating its fin-thin wings.

I want to stand beneath
the undulating sky and
give up last breaths,
give up last breaths,
give up last breaths,
buried before I die.

Ma Mere

I broke him
into 1200
cigarettes,
1200 perfect
plastic placentas,
1200 weeks
from the week
that I broke him.

I broke him
into ceramic sky,
into olive jungles,
into sea salt,
into light,

into lions,

into light.
I broke him
with a wide-
toothed comb,
with a rake,
with a sentence.

I broke him
like a vase
on my suicide box,
and my last eye
watched rainbows
sunshone
through the prism
of his skin.

Metaphor for My Mother

My mother is an apple tree.

we

fall

close

we, her golden red delicious
we, her pie cider sauce
we, her stem core skin.
My mother is an apple tree.
She knows what it’s like to hold us,
to have us harvested.

My mother is a carnival.

up

right

step

to her cotton candy lungs
her Ferris wheel face
her rollercoaster limbs.
My mother is a carnival.
She is the pieces mirrors and beagle-tongued
barker who holds our tickets at the gate.

My mother is a mountain lake

beautiful

quiet crater cold with water
silk like milk and wings
opal-chested swan of the treacherous crags
My mother is a mountain lake,
liquid hands hard enough to still hold
five rivers by the tail.

Sigh

If there are rabbit holes,
Chinks in the wall,
I'll find them.
I'll weave my body through them
Like wicker.

So when the wind blows
Through me, you'll
Hear me,
Little wooden screams.