The Visit

The kindred rock skips down muddy river Umpqua, makes a wash of me white linen, hand-heeled down tin washer board, the running chord, the echoed brushfire—

Winter worry puts me on my knees on rocks riding shallows, bitter sloshes of holy goulashes in November, and I remember thinking, this exists.

Homesteader

Cadence claws its way back from reality,

storms with brief brutality, wrecks the deviled shore.

I thought before that I knew what life was.

Now I am starting over again

a requiem for peace,

reaching of the soul,

clutching it from our careworn natures

now and later, at the hour of our death

we shall fear no evil, for Love art with us—

Debate on the Patriot Act

My brain is on wire for an hour afterwards, lying naked under the fan and starting to cool off, realize my nakedness. I have no idea where I am except for this body—Scrooge, why do you doubt your senses? Cause I’m a nomadic tunes-woman, strewn from winnowed tree nutshells, the willow wander, the ebb and holler of the geese in Wakonda. I stop astounded at the softened conscience, tallow found from glass Orwellian make-up shops, and easily avertable pick up lines from wasty-face wiggers outside of Looney’s Pub in the summer and it was all easy; rather, it seems that way now, flexing back on it, hindquarters march this awkward limp down the cherry-wood hall to the powder room.

Gargle with Salt Water

Hinge as if breath depends on it,

if water deepened its breast tomorrow,

to reel it back in and swallow,

whittled down to totem poles that fit in your palm:

Pennsylvania sycamores rust, kAY-tee-dIds

buck this humming sugared November,

geese slip tender under my flannel sheets,

warn me that this cannot last:

harden deer-corn left to crack,

and fold under the stolid pressure of widowed stagnance,

the pale face of keep-on-fighting, even as we pack it in,

give ourselves airs but we ain’t fooling no body,

our hands wEAthereDim the evening light.

November

We have a brief chance at finding truth each morning, and if we pass it by falling back asleep, or staring out the window and wishing it wasn’t gray again, and raining cold as church on Monday, then the whole day is thrown over the balcony with the blanket and baby and the bath water, the dirty toilet bowl seat cover, the yellowed wall paper because that’s the one room where we can smoke cigarettes, it used to be white I guess at some point. I used to believe in what I said at some point, I didn’t question any of it because John was the only one who was going to read it, and I know he’s as utterly mad as I am so he’ll get what I’m saying. I mean if something really needed to be changed he would say it but we don’t get so caught up on these formal elements that everyone seems to be so on about; we use them as they come to us not because of what they are. We don’t get hung on much of anything, we like to hear language out loud as it was originally, so I speak and John sings and plays the guitar and it’s all simple. When I start bringing in other people they always feel a need to immediately give me their opinion, like, how bout I don’t give a shit a bout your opinion, if I did, I would ask for it, not write a fucking poem and bare my goddamn soul to you, take the gift I’m giving you and relish your own silence the way I look forward to being alone at the end of the day.

Domestic

Hypoallergenic beehives are my natural namesakes. I raked the tired stairs of red leaves, the garter snake eyes me in the crawl space, the garden hose, the sodden moss grows, grey blows a gristled craw-dad, Bay Saint Louis Mississippi sips the Southern storm: heed the weathered bird, string you from the corn.  Harford hay bales roll the hills for miles and I get lost driving to find myself again but this last time, I met the winter’s abject sunker, stalked me down like a deer.  I cannot hear my soul no more, jack’s unhooked, tied my keds together under the desk.  The auto-mechanic hits on milfs shameless, the pond scum, the rabbit, the cold wooden attic, the rooster’s hold, the widow’s watch, sister in the keep, and oil in the pan.

Down On the River

Storm has a little crack in his flue,

the night owls get in and make nests in the wood rafter kitchen,

ruffling a stew.

But he brews out the hassle,

harvesting beans as full as the moon,

knit splintered thistle into wool gray,

and dirt into cold boiled clay.

Beginning In The Middle

As soon as you think you have something figured, you lose it again.  There was a time we had a time when it was easy to hear it and it was because I was moving as fast as my mind, never stayed in any place more than three days and that was in Boulder.  Before that, we had camped out in the Rockies on Arapahoe Bay, the coldest night of sleep yet, after coming from Texas too, record heat all day, and there was a drought and all the grass was dead, the bottom halves of tree leaves would turn brown, fall off in the middle of August.  We passed a car accident on the other side of the highway.  A car was on fire and another car was wrapped around the front grill of a tractor-trailer.  A woman was screaming into her cell phone and another was directing traffic, we drove passed it with the windows down still, we had been trying to avoid air conditioning out of some idea that it would be better for the car, maybe it was for Ganesha, a sacrifice of comfort as it were—that lasted til about noon, when we were thoroughly drenched, Red shirtless, me with my shirt rolled up and skirt hiked up, covering the necessaries with the yards of fabric gathered down the middle, my right foot parched up on the window sill, and we realized that it was hotter in the wind, than in the hot ass fucking car.  At the next rest stop, we closed the windows, filled our camel paks with warm water from a ground pump and waited for the temperature of the car to level off.

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red breast robin

storm the weathered cove,

the daffled whim,

the wary why

cold cough, and sigh glass

shudder silver branches

that scratch the midnight weeds,

the crippled eagle lurch—

spin the gypsy line,

reeling in the fishing wire

and each time, casting it again,

faster than thistle Friday catches wool

the wryly whistle blows,

heaves the gritty bastion,

storms the French Bastille,

the Harbor mist

hunkered under

Baltimore grist:

the gravel winter,

wisdom of shiver,

our hands red from washing pans

in the almost frozen river—

Amish, then trailer park,

ass end up against the foot pedal highway,

bent, the skyline

a rusted factory,

the old industrial glow of stability,

the rock chewn and fed tick blood belly,

for what seemed like years,

returned the fear

of sitting alone

a whippoorwill

in the backyard night,

silent, until we went inside,

and then the geese, they pass over

for much of November

the last ones from Canada

save the weather

for swallow,

woodpecker

and Atticus Finch:

Scout grows like corn stalks

hacked down to brittle hairs,

stubborn, but gives

an eastward bow to the sunrise

out of the portside bedroom

pheasants in their foul weather furrow,

black bears hibernate in cave dens

and we buck ourselves in,

stiffen glide the ribboned wind

over the balding farmlands;

the sycamores still breathe,

the maples shake their hands,

moss clings to bottom bark

and reds the wood like clay.