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. 

Spring Prophesy

When the high wall breaks

upon you in a wave

of chrysanthemum petals like

burning green

sparks at a New Year festival,

and the purple martins hover

above their nests, diving and

soaring,

never landing as they eat

scrambled eggs that you

prepared just

minutes ago and are

now launching towards

their voracious wings

held aloft by some

will that is external to you

yet dusts your cheeks like a fine

sand in the morning,

making you glow like the

dawning sun

seen through last night’s wine

glass left on the terrace wall to

collect tears of morning

dew, then you will know

that what I say is true.  The green

leaves on the tender

tips of maple twigs pulse with

the same sap that is in you

and I.   The martin winging over

your head purples with the same

urge as your lover before

all knowing is abandoned

to impulse.  The cricket the martin                

eats enraptures its sensitive

thighs, opens them to the wind,

lets everything in.

Elusion

Tamarack:

soft green

down drops,

and underneath,

the roots of

a gooseberry.

Night Rhapsody with Horses

I
Every horse head swinging against some medieval town’s gate
          sings with the weight of stones.
Decapitated carriage: it lays a foundation that persists like tongues.
          Siren call at night, let me swim with you from the wreck.

I once dreamed I wanted a horse so badly I flew to the moon to find
          one. I ran over fields of bending, whitewashed barley until I breathed
cerulean vapors, and then I levitated. The mind of a yogi in some ashram,
          sun-shielded by a fingered palm and caterpillared shirt, felt my ascent
and smiled. His toes curled into the dirt with the Knowledge and then
          the earth knew. Then it all knew: air, breath, fiber, being. The thought
was there and it reached out. Dark void, full of awareness,
          oscillating on the edge of an event. Vibration like a hoof beat and
the pony knew I was coming. Bent on escape, it heaved itself
          past sun-glint deserts of frozen life, reduced to a held breath, until
it came to the edge. Dusty Phoenician arroyo. Mythical
          geography couldn’t fence him in. When I got there, too late,
the pony—never mine—had jumped the rim and was steaming
          through the starflake like a crocus melting snow.

II
Some
galleon

awash

cracks

and
you

take

to the hoof

self prophesy

III
The horse’s lips move, back there,
swinging on that saw-split gate. Silent
riddle. It knows the truth about the

spotted handkerchief. The myth is
persistent. Water can’t wash it away.
The stain of life: False promise

whispering truths like horizon pre
dawn. The queen in the castle must
be an imposter. She laughs and her

golden hair twins itself into three
caskets. The candles gutter as a
cloud casts an absinthe light in the

chapel. The pews are stained black.
Books close. A glowworm pulses
like a fist. In the forest there have been

whispers: “You must be aware...”
She rode a black horse into town, hid
a severed pinky in her bodice and gave

a smile like damsons to entice him
into this pact. Look into her eyes:
the pupils are a boat that silently

pushes away from a dock in the night
at the same time that a hummingbird
sleeps and a breathless messenger

arrives with a yellowed scroll: “Come
to me.” Her eyelash is the moment
after the trap has sprung. The castle is

wrapped in the pall of sleep and the
silence of tongues. Still. Still like wind
through needles: “Someone must save

him.” The inside of a horse’s lips are as
perceptive as a dog’s nose. Bankrupt
frog sighing in the night. Mumbling

on the gate, snorting hints until he
strikes a chord, the horse’s thoughts
fall on ears like golden cups.

IV
The snow-covered pine forests

The leather fire pouch

Drink the absence of the bear’s eye

Waves of time as light as boulders

A stain of mistletoe

Horse song in the night

Shape of a woman

V
Sometimes now, I dream a head singing on a gate,
          or a raven on a tower wall. And sometimes there’s a noose.
And some times what’s strung up is a shepherd and
          sometimes time’s the swing that keeps swinging. But the horse
in the foreground is forever grazing. Still prophesying—ready to
          catch whatever falls: a man, a feather, a myth, this mouthful of thorns.