Poetry

The woods chatter like a million skulls
cicada-full, louder than I’ve 
         heard

a drove, a teeming gone at sundown
replaced by aurora-silk 
         flags

waves, movies on hazy sheets spread
east to west, 
          dark

in the greening piedmont, the slope
a tilt, wide—and groaning for 
          fall-lines,

O the watershed, the characters living here
among and above, around these holy open 
          fields

alternate their sleep and wakings
then post it all to the 
          sky.

At the end of it
   my mother grew light.
  Seemed hollow the way
   bird bones are hollow. 
Mom could sit forever
   at the breakfast table to finger
   her silver rosary strung with blue
   glass beads that had small pocks
As some flower seeds are almost
   perfect spheres but fall short
   have pocks, flaws. Mom said 
   her quiet Hail Mary’s decade after decade
Until she’d finally doze off somewhere between
“The fruit of thy womb” and “the hour of our death.”

The ground is our enduring hope. First came
   months of a relentless scorching that lasted
   beyond any reckoning we have ever known.
   The earth grew angry, strangled many things.
Then came a time when geese arrived back
   in our skies and on the shyly lapping
   shores of our lakes. In black night geese’s blasts
   shake stars. Between those two times, earth’s orbit 
Tilted us away from the sun. The fibers of satsuma
   spiders in vibrating webs, dew as it drenches fields
   even sheets of paper on desks feel this
   the removal of sun’s intensity. Feel
That decrease lift in every cell. Such loss is gain
Held in quiet and in speech upon our tongues.

Inside a single diamond of rain
   heaven might rest. 
   You can be doing anything
   sliding towels into a cabinet
Turning the page on
   an afternoon nap
   and tell in your bones
   the exact second 
When rain, any rain 
   starts, when it stops.
   Aren’t deer, raccoons
   and trees like that also.
Absolutely 
Married to air.

Boxes teeter on edges,
crammed full of younger selves,
formative but now unrecognisable,
faces in thickened mist.

Dancing shoes are packed:
laying head to toe,
mimicking children
in large Victorian families,
nestled for warmth in bed,
coping with lack of space.

As I tape and label boxes,
I wonder which will stay closed,
concealing its underbelly forever,
refusing to give up its wares
for prouder, newer houses.

Sometimes, I wish to crawl in,
tape myself up
with kitchen crockery,
burrowing to forgetfulness,
finding a singular space
where moving does not exist:
viewings, listings, sale boards, asking prices
are ghostly figments,
glittering to coal dust
in darkened cardboard corners.

But then I see her,
eyes dilating with what can be:
more space, wraparound gardens,
kitchen islands to dance around.

Quite suddenly,
cardboard cities
are no longer a place of refuge.

My thoughts climb back out,
placing my imagination
upon taller, wiser trees,
where it can see sunlit bands
of new possibilities.

We regroup, join forces,
as we search for new homes,
eager, now readied,
on the move.

I think of her now, how she loved gardens,
and the genuine grace of her soul

That word she used for the slate of human construction,
calling here and there to smallish birds

Black dahlias, illustrative envelopes of sound,
things no listening can hear

The Cana Lilly, the big flowers failed states
in the small corners we call we weeds,

Dove blue gods that let every sparrow
fall with parasols, from the opulence of their death,

Marigolds, young and disenfranchised, destitute,
payless wanderlusts, half the age of the sun,

Secret credulities of hybrids, upstart redacted notions,
of what a flower might say

Were it to salute the queen bee,
as its rump pollinates the whole,

On the day we have risen into missionary position,
forgetting the frugalities of war,

Speechless as a seed, rounded vowels bootstrapped
to the tigers, crouched in the undergreen,

Strong colours for the wireless calling,
the shyness haunting the internecine affair,

And in the ravine, singer of the olive tree,
orchards illuminated, a dais of waifish sea

Crawling the waves stoked by dawn,
limericks of dancing leprechauns and an unctuous breeze,

Couched behind words unspoken, in the back rooms
of ivory towers, unloved and unheard.