Poetry

I was born
on the dark side of 
a pinkish moon

between two suns
 on a Thursday 
morning in August

when hail melt
filled the streets with strawberry lemonade 
while

my parents mended
 their 
marriage on the spot

for the first of
many times and my mother in
 her sweet young voice

sang a soft lullaby of stars
 and snowflakes
and gentle beasts that roam

the jungles and savannas
underneath what I’ve come to know as the other side of
 a tilting whirring swirling dream.

What I remember most 
about your bedroom was
the view through one of
the two windows that looked

out onto a red maple. When
we first met, I would watch
the leaves on that tree change 
slowly from their gay summer green

to an autumn maroon, as we lay, naked, 
untangled, on weekend afternoons, 
divorced, each with a daughter, knowing 
even then we had no future together,

you with your horses, boots, and 
line dancing, me with my East Coast 
education and trench coat draped 
over my arm. I never said it would

work, never dreamt of still owning
each other in the spring, when the tree 
outside your bedroom window in that 
trailer park up north began to drip

with snowmelt, the blossoms 
appearing, to me, for the first time, 
the noose of time being lifted from 
around my neck, the thick ice in

Horsetooth Reservoir breaking up, 
cracking in the warmth of the March 
sun, while the last galaxies of 
tenderness were shared between us.

Way out there
          the gulf stream-river
steams
dreams, flows over
           the great tilt
past smaller countries
           within reach
warmed, green
quiet wading great fields
            of ocean
of cloud, to african
            beaches
or up through 
celtic seas to poles
            too big for 
eyes.

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.