Poetry

An uncle set up milk crates
and tobacco sticks, ran long
wires between post and barn

while three aunts draped
painter’s cloths, opened
bedsheets and fabric coverings,

shrouded over sprouted greens
and new shoots from a condition
warned but yet to transpire.

In the failing light breath rose
among their ghost garden,
the three sisters unspooling

muslin across the shorter
peach trees as defense against
the final fears of spring.

Ascending the northeastern ridge of Guyot,
two men discovered post hole hoofprints
through the snow, sluffed powder slipping
away like leaden plumage or crushed limestone
through a quarry’s flute. They followed heavy
tracks for three hours, snowshoes holding
their boots aloft between frozen ground and light.
When they paused where wind cut drifts
across the saddle of the hill’s arch-backed gap,
exposed stone hid the passage of the mount
like ash consumed within a river’s froth.
Half a mile further on they began to find
saddlery bits and various tack like downy
feathers littering the trail, dark leather
wet from scuffs of slush, then one man
called out that he’d found crisp brass
sleigh bells shining in late December sun.

We know what kind of people we are–
musical or allergic,
sclerotic and/or criminal–

based upon the ads we are fed.
In the economy of the hypermobile
fetish,

we can’t not internalize
what we might be prone to buy
if signaled to.

Last week we were contacted
by radio waves
three hundred billion light years away,

an incident many argued proves
that the desire to bloviate in the
conveyance of mere presence

knows no solar system’s
jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, a set of

copper wound strings shimmers
in an animated gif
with all that strings suggests:

dark matter, quarks,
celestial windings, an elegant
bridge of spruce and bone.

your mother never loved you
the way you love me.

you felt safer in the arms of a man
over twice your age at 13, a man 

who touched you in the back room
of the dance studio then made you his wife. 

I hurt because you never knew what safe was
as I lay here in my bed and think 

of all the things I wish I could say to him.
all the ways you should have been 

held, your voice like birds as you
rub my arm and sing me to sleep, God 

is so good and I cry because people
weren’t always good to you. You didn’t

know the neighbor was your sister and
you didn’t know your dad wasn’t 

your dad and I need you to know
that you are not your mother. 

railroad tracks ran
like spaced steps across
warm earth.

the distance between each
measured by held hands
and conversations.

strawberry alcohol painted
my lips a shade of red
and I learned how much he loved
his mother.

abandoned tracks towered
over a river, lifeless
the only breathing from the oaks.

wet tar covered my white shoes and turned
them black, caked by heat
as we crossed to the other side
with my eyes closed and his
wide open 

don’t look down
so I did and the tracks turned
to cliffs, and the trees to mountains
I was somewhere in between

clouds dotted the sky
like splatter paint, we were abstract
in a forest lining
water that didn’t move

birds sang as we ventured,
we were children again
running, laughing at nothing
and betting on who could find
the biggest walking stick 

it leans against the door of his
front porch now, as we sit at dusk
on the neon chairs and I think
back to the turning leaves of seabowoshi 

The new moon can’t bear
to show her face.
On the baseball field
a pair of geese preen
in peace. Coralberry blooms
around the Contemplation
Circle, gifting a quick hello
from a hummingbird among
the conifers. In my headphones:
a score composed for the planets.
My little pigeon-scattering
companion chases the breeze
as we move toward the castle.
His clover-damp mustache
and paws get lost among
tufts of untamed lawn.
How strangely lush
the months-grown grass.
How red the wet underbelly
of an acorn.
Pine-blonde tail
flexes as a squirrel
bows toward a burial.
Behind the ivy
of the stone-tucked transverse, lights
and wails move
west towards home.