Growl for the Moon

She calls. Is a bobcat on fire.  Wants my hunger and my scissors.

Growls low because she needs to know I’m hers—that the moon’s always here. 

At night she fears we’ll drift apart, so she hides the knife, ties me close.

The Sowing, The Reaping

There’s something about spring that urges me to

forget all the grudges we’ve swept under our marital

blanket of snow.  You’d say we shouldn’t bury the seeds—

weeds grow where they’re least looked for; like Jason

the farmer, we’ll only reap what we sow.  But unbounded from

the four walls of home, the threat of fully-armed anger has

less importance to me than the horses nickering in the paddocks. 

The stones wreathing the fields like dinner rolls.

It’s a small thing, the newly-turned earth, yet somehow, still

living, we’re reborn from it: The wheat that pushes through

itself to become itself again.  Maybe we should send our dirt on

the wind.  Take it out with the rugs, beat it into the haze that

rises above the tractor and watch it float away over the hill.

The Last Moonbeam Pushes Up Against The Scrim

Fresno’s drive-in is still open—a reprieve from the rest of it.

The beam searches across the crinolined dark.

A woman in a red Honda opens her mouth for a jujube as

her son gleefully pegs it into her eye. 

     Things that never leave:

     impressions, mists, your mother

In the Poconos two lovers push themselves together and pant out their postmodern 

urges until the room pulses with guilty avoidance.

As they finish, you move forward with a sigh into my hand, nuzzle the

back of my eyes into orange explosions like flour fluorescing in a bakery fire.  Then 

the moment is      over.                  

Can we ever know that we are

loved at the      exact     moment                                that we love? 

     the tongue-licked fur of a Banded Galloway

     the lust of the child for the teat

     Genuine need         

     Wish in one hand shit in another

The figures flicker on the screen.  A dead man plays his comic

part and someone props him into a beach chair, gives him a drink,

pretends he hasn’t started to smell.  When I was seven, my mother

and I took a trip to Florida.  At the restaurant papered in peacock

blue, I ordered an artichoke that I later vomited into a toilet at a motel

across from the ocean.  It rained for the next three days.  When the

storms were over, tadpoles swam on the pool deck.  The man in the

car in front of us is wearing a toupee.  As we watch, his lover gently

raises it, caresses his bare head, leans in and kisses his ear.

Like Nothing She Wanted

A woman in a hotel room in Prescott puts a

paper sack full of nickels on the nightstand,

pulls open the drawer and slides out the

Bible and some free note paper.  “Some day

I’m going to forget all of this,” she writes, folds

the paper in half, and sticks it in Proverbs.  She

remembers blowing out shots of Everclear

once instead of candles. The bottle in her hand

now feels like she felt last July.  After a few

somethings, she notices that someone has carved

notches into—tried to turn into—.   The edge of the

bed is like teeth.  There’s something hovering

above the door.  The shape is like nothing she

wanted.  When she leaves the hotel, it is dawn,

and her shoes leave tracks like hot ash in the snow.  

When the Snow Falls Like Angels

By definition a volcano is winter hardy, that much is

obvious, but there’s so much that isn’t:  “Mary” is a

popular name for varieties of roses (Lincoln), apples

(Reid), and asparagus (Washington).  You should plant

ten roots per family member.  Some mushrooms turn

blue and dissolve as soon as you pick them—poisonous

disappearing ink.  The bones found in canned rattlesnake

are similar to those found in canned salmon.  When the

snow falls like angels, you’ll be glad to have permaloft;  

When the snow falls like angels, it’s the perfect time for citrus.

I love the word “Archipelago.”  Somehow it manages to be

seduction and onomatopoeia all at once. “Slick” is the same. 

I want to murmur it in a cold room as I take off my shirt and you

watch.  Instead, I shrug into an orange t-shirt in the dark, shake

my blonde hair and listen for your truck to rumble at the curb.

The Strength to Raise Chickens

I. 

One summer we hung lace

curtains in the window and

kept chickens in the yard.

In the night, you had to run

out with a shotgun to scare

the neighbor dog away from

the coop.  Later, a raccoon

got in and forced a slaughter. 

When we knew what had

happened, we hosed it down,

poured bleach on the floor,

scrubbed everything with a

long-handled brush.  You said

give up—we don’t eat eggs

anyway—but the next spring

you came home with another

box of chicks.  You built an

incubator out of an old door

and some scrap lumber.  We

strung light bulbs from long

cords, dangled them down

brightly close to trembling

beaks, feathers that moved

like dandelions two days shy

of destruction.  Every morning,

you opened the box, which

ended up looking like a coffin,

and scattered feed, scooped

bits of life into hands as big as 
the buckets of a steam shovel, 
and held them to your cheeks.  
But when your mother died, you 
couldn’t do any of this.  Day after 
day, you couldn’t open the curtain, 
couldn’t bare to see dappled 
sunlight on the end of the bed.

II.

a line of

light

at the window

a silhouette

across your

 feet.

She lay in a bed

much like this one

taking      breaths     here, with us,

and    exhaling    them

somewhere

else.           

III.

That’s what you did too, after—

inhaled and exhaled in two different

places.  But you multiplied her,

matched her breath for breath until

your penance outlasted hers.  You

couldn’t tell that you’d been absolved

even before you’d asked for forgiveness. 

Some days, keening in a voice that belonged

to you and someone else, you would hold

your stone of sorrow out for me to see.  Never

letting me hold it, you wanted me to

acknowledge its shape and size, but all

I saw was a golden nugget of amber: tree’s

tear frozen in time; a moment suspended

somewhere else and dropped into your

palm.   And then one day you brought me a

feather, touched it to my face, and told me it

felt like falling asleep in your mother’s lap.

IV.

Grey eyes close in a grey room.

Grey eyes open in a grey dawn.

In the burned fields after a long

fallow, the fire-charred seeds

pop open—the skunk weed 

unfurls in the ditches.

V.

Finally, when the chicks turned feather-slick and

skittish under your thumbs, shied from the tender

tips of your fingers, you turned them out into

the yard.  Each night you herded them back to the

coop, locked it tight and checked the wire on

the window, the gap in the roof.  Every morning you

looked for eggs, threw open the coop door, waved

the stragglers away from the cosmos and watched

the flock skim the ground and flutter into the

low-hanging boughs of the pine at the end of the driveway.  

Falling Through Into Elephants

I.

Sylvie is counting trees.  She walks through

the woods she inherited from her mother

and runs her hands over the glassine bark.  If

she stands very still, she can feel the trees

moving.  By holding her breath, she is able

to convince herself that she is moving with

them, listing in the wind, dragging across a

continent, rotating around a core.  Usually,

when she walks, it feels like ice-skating alone

on a window, her feet sliding across life like

skin slips from a boiled peach.  Sometimes when

she sits, chin in palm, she fears her face could

slip away from her brain just as easily.  In the

woods though, she feels connected.  Maybe it’s

because, deep down, she believes her feet and

the soil are materially the same.  Or it’s the air. 

She knows it is as clear as the vitreous humour

within her eyeball.  She looks at the world and

laughs because her eyes want her to.  If her

brain didn’t flip it, the world would seem to be

floating.  It’s all about perception.  She pats the

leg, runs her hands over it, feels its warmth. 

Scratching the hide, she feels maternal.  This

one could have fallen through the soft mud

somewhere in Asia, just as her feet could fall through

themselves where she stands.  His mind is there,

but his legs are here.  Sylvie likes that her mind

and the elephant’s give her something to hold on

to.  Without her, he’d float away like Goodyear

in a high wind.  Realizing the trees, she begins to

count again.  Oaks, hickories, maples, and three

mulberries that bleed tears in the summertime. 

And then the tamarack.  She’s suspicious of that

one.  “Deciduous evergreen.”  From the corner

of her eye it seems like a pine, but straight on it

looks like she forgot her glasses—frowsy,

half-brushed and shedding. 

II.

Sylvie likes to walk Indian file in the fall and think

about James Fennimore Cooper.  She takes mincing

steps in her moccasins and remembers what it felt

like to walk on the edge.  She kisses a trunk and

croons, “Natty Bumpo.”  Daintily stepping on, but

not shuffling through, the leaves, she hears a drumbeat.

Despite that, walking softly, she leads with her knees. 

She doesn’t like the noise the underbrush makes when

she sweeps through it, a susurration that’s more like

a hiss than the breeze above her head.  Her shoes cast

shadows in the noonday sun.  She lifts one high and peers

beneath it, but what she’s looking for isn’t there.  The

drumming gets louder, and a woodpecker taps itself into

existence.  She knows that’s portentous: the black pig

always finds her.  Before coming to the woods, she

abstained from looking at the moon for month, didn’t

wear silver, braided grass into her hair, but it seems

that the ritual’s dead.  She touches the trees when she

counts them and tries to get her list right, but she knows

they sometimes multiply while she watches. Distractions

like that make her skin feel loose. Reaching out to knock a

strange mushroom from her wrist, Sylvie realizes that’s

what the pig wants.  Her skin.  A child’s sticker of a frog.  A

scrap of dried orange clinging to a stump.  She peels it off

and it leaps into the underbrush with a sound like rage or

wind chimes.  Looking at the place on her arm where the

frog had been perched all this time, she sees that she is now

as smooth as a baby’s eyelid.  Her nails are drips of tallow on

an altar cloth.  And when the pig appears, her heart unfurls

like a fiddlehead in spring.  She shakes water out of her hair

and it’s the drops in the spider web netted across a bramble

of blown roses.  Sylvie knows she is the pig now.  Through eating,

we become…

III.

One oak, two oak, three oak.  And there—

a first sassafras!  So slender time could

hide behind it.  Biting the inside of her

cheek, she tastes horehound and licorice. 

Something to be bought over the counter

at a general store while wearing calico.  She

looks at a broken branch, a drip of sap frozen

in motion, and wipes away blood.  It smells of

yesterday, of motor oil, and her hands are

as yellowed as roasted chestnuts.  A rim of

metal glints at her feet, and Sylvie slips out of

her moccasins.  The pig pushes its nose into

the soil, tastes oranges and hears a voice like

lumber—overhead and insistent.  There’s something

about the hickories that screams teenage daughters. 

She’s glad she doesn’t have any.  The air is too clear,

the bark under her nails too rough, her watchband

too tight for the elephants to balance.