query

What is your true nature, it asks me,
Part lover, part Zen teacher,
slapping the back of my hand
Til I awaken
You want mountain? Easy--
Sling me across the landscape
like the body of a voluptuous
sleeping grandmother
yes,
a voluptuous, sleeping
grandmother,
or a river
calling one fickle moment after next--
go on, just try to step into me twice

I could claim my calm pool and my drop
rapids and my many many eddies
But that’s too easy
because really what lies at the bottom
of each breath

is the line of ants doing the bunny-hop
along the edge of my bathtub,
and you know what we are all asking,
what you are already thinking—

Why do ants carry their dead?

this tiny army of pumped-up amazons
hoist their fallen sisters onto their backs
and carry this mystery with each body,
as they spill into the hole at the edge of the caulking

..they carry them back and devour them to absorb their memories

...they are delivered to the great ant graveyard
and laid to rest where their sisters,
like weeping elephants, will visit
season after season, to graze their antennae
against the beloved and hollow exoskeletons

..that when they tap each other as they pass
on opposite commutes, they’re playing
an endless game of telephone,
so when the deceased are dismantled
like old motherboards
the punchline data is finally retrieved,
the fruit of a million messages
passed a million times.

I sit for 20 days in silence,
every moment a wrestling match
with god, and a hope
to emerge with my life purpose,
or at least a better sense of humor.
Instead, I emerge from the cave
with only this:
Ants..carry…dead…why?
and the oracle I consult
heaves up a thousand pages of Darwin
and a thousand more, asking the same question

I know the answer is there, but I prefer,
I think, to end my days not knowing,
but imagining,

because
every time I ask, that long line
of the humble and mighty sisters
carries me back to the colony
where everything,
sublime and grotesque,
is happening at once

Road sign Immigrant Leaf hope

Fear, the faultline of near misses

bleeding a churlish stain on the lee side of sure

can’t ever leave the cantilever

on the road to remote

immigrant passes blanched like clean sheets

peeling green-bean-strings into fiddle-head soup

leaves a twang on your tongue

if you sip it right

Song, I am

I am late,

again,

but worth waiting for

I be the god in the glottal stop

that can stop traffic,

put out streetlights in my sleep.

I am the cello-waisted

baritone under your breath,

makes the knees of bees

quiver in their hives,

Honey

I am the haze in Monet’s gaze,

a cat purring on your

sacred sacrum

while you dream

of roots reaching down to trace

the fractal weave of leaves,

the bloom of your lungs, singing,

bringing the be to becoming,

thrumming

the strings of all those lost pianos

in Iowa fields, humming

a sea of middle-C’s

I am the sea change and return

I am the conclusion, foregone,

the forlorn beginning

of beginning again,

and again, a wren

wriggling the first worm

under her gibbous moon

the gibbon grinning

with the inside joke of every punch-

line

saying,

not so bad, baby,

not too late:

you
were worth
waiting for

Pigeon in three breaths

I don’t care if you call me
A rat with wings--
I’ve heard worse.
We gutter dwellers, so misunderstood
I wish I could claim crane,
or lion,
or, Shiva help me,
a Warrior,

but some mornings I have
to curl my bent wing to my heart
and bow down
to the fact of this,
taste the tar as if it’s nectar.

What if you find that your power
animal is an earthworm,
a crafty trilobite,
a small black ant carrying
its dead brother back home?

We imagine grandeur, but the god hands us
a broom and says, here, now this,
And this.
This time around
you are the soiled cousin
of the angels’ white dove,
flying donuts
around that holy spirit,
laughing

hum

Wide hum thrum
sternum purrs, om old cat
My legs, torso, heart,
Feel the pulse
of blood stream stone silence
the way in the way
through the way forgotten,
re-membered through bone, not brain
through skin and tones
breath calling you home
calling you
home
where ya been girl? Kept a pot
on for ya just in case
this family of tones, vibration of this
simple thing yes
you can have this yes you can
be no need to everwhelm them
from the place they’re calling from

Ferry

Breathe
Yes,
Hurry up and sleep, we need
the pillows
A liminal start three nights
in a row, remembering
my Ruby slippers, clicking.
The way home is easy,
but somewhere back and back
I forgot the cradle
of my diaphragm,
its rocking

Now, my pedal to metal,
I can barely pause to tell you this...
last night I remembered
that crucial thing I’d forgotten:
my third arm,
or that I’ve always spoken Cantonese,
or that my flute master
is still waiting for me, twenty-three years later,
in her mahogany parlor
It slapped me awake, bright and insistent,
then hopped back onto the ferry, disappearing
with all of its rigging, into the mist

Across the night sky,
my mother rises
at 3 am, stumbles around the house,
every moment, now, a ferry she has just missed
trying to remember what she has forgotten,
crib sheets tucked into her sleeve
with the names of the children
who cracked open her rocking pelvis
seven times,
this boat too, taken back
downriver, this life, an overripe berry,
dissolving, on the tip of her tongue

One breath

Breath

Held through two rock valley,
past the nude sheep and singing lambs,
through shafts of light offered only
after the dead have fallen away,
past deer carcass, skunk, barn owl,
offering, as they must,
roadkill married to moment’s glory.

It is never one thing
in the aching span between
in and out, pausing
at the tip of the tongue before
creation, again, saying,
Here,
How about this?
And this?
And then this?
One breath, shotgun wedding of truth
that this is your life, choice
to linger at the nectar of nothing,
the intermezzo before another starts,
the making of worlds
in the bellows of your sweet accordion

a piano found in a field

(this from last prompt, alas...)

I’m reeling it in, A Virginia Reel across the strings
Plucking the lower keys with my big toe,
Lay my toes

across the mahogany,
my mahogany southern body
my key, my white teeth clacking middle C
This is where I’ve ended up
Finally,
blood flowing through ivory

Sorry, sorry,
dear elephant who never lived on my street
but dies in the living room each time a third grader
huffs her way through Chopsticks.
Bow your head to the pachyderm tapped in every note
Bow your back to the staccato plea of each key
And each tiny bum on the leatherette bench

One key per breath,
finding the space between the notes,
that gap-toothed smile
between atoms

north task

Start with Spanish Moss, a generous clump.
This is your wand/feather fan. You’ll be glad to have it.

You know where to go. First and last step is listening.

As you enter, brush the foreheads of the moss-covered cousins as you pass them. Bow before entry, first at the door, then at what you know to be the sanctuary.

Bow to the stone people. There is a seat waiting for you. Take it.

Put the Spanish moss on top of your head. Not a peep from you.

You can’t still the voice in your head. It is making little assignments even now, or rehearsing speeches, or making up recipes, or witty poems—listen to everything but that.

Every cousin around you is calling its name in your ear. Every auntie is baking delights for you in the spent grass and rotting leaves beneath you.

Turn away from your own thinking. YOU have already thought 90% of this yesterday, and the day before. Turn, then, and let wind be your lover. Let it kiss every pore. Lean into the tree behind you—it knows all the secrets and then some.

Notice the mysteries of the scat by your foot. Shh. Quiet. There is something we have to tell you.

here’s the catch: this will save you, but only if you don’t expect it to. Sometimes a breath is just a breath. Sometimes it is as lonely as a siloh.

The Guest

The Guest

When you arrive at the tavern,
you breathe, first, on the window,
draw a wet spiral toward the keeper inside
You have wandered
crabwise
for years,toward this beaded light,
pulling the thread from edge to center

whistling along the periphery,
But here it is,
pulling you from the aching and brilliant day
to this even greater night.
If you follow that call
to the dimly lit threshold,
you’ll know you’ve arrived
by the catch in your throat

as you stand,
teetering on the liminal
wood beneath your soles,
wondering,

are you welcome? You know, peering in,
that you will sweep this cabin empty
if it is your nature
and even still, yes, Welcome

You knew
the moment you stepped
from the great prairie,
delivering punctuation
to the infinite
with this one word,
resting on its carpetbag,
drawing its name in the sand