Night blooming. Suckle of honey. What the mockingbird wears to keep his balance. Hair-thin like the girls here who skip dessert but allow themselves real cream for their coffee. The man who combs his beard while praying, the Sufis say, is not admitted to heaven, though he repents by tearing it out. Silly man, see how he is still obsessed with it. This evening, after dinner, I go walking, the perfume Irene has given me sprayed on my wrists. I start with the trees, more simply with the leaves. I walk my way in, scenting the grasses. Where the country begins: fox left like a dirty rag on the road, folk who handle snakes to heal themselves. Better than drugs and cheaper, Irene said. Everyone has a need for transcendence. William Carlos Williams knew nothing of what it is takes for a woman to stand naked in her own house. Cancer in her bones, dancing to Roy Orbison. No, I won’t ever be cured, Irene told the thin girls. It’s in the nature of the disease.
Sweetbriar
Today, my cusp. I have hit full bloom. Already you can feel me close, on my way back to you. You cannot see what rose is at my lips or where its tender arbors in my hair, white, soft as banana. Today, I am glutted with gloss. Today, anything I don’t like I call postmodern. Go inside a stone, that would be your way. I am wandering the woodlots of childhood. No one knew then what to call the hatched vines snaking up these trunks like a hair shirt. But the pauses I remember, when the country lane gladdened the shed summer light or when the brown water disappeared under oak. Oak large as mountains. It is a wonder any one of us survived. I hid in the lilacs, their voluptuous violet shade, the cool dirt underneath I would dig my hands in. My people, or “kind grandparents of the corn and sun” have all but disappeared from the fields. We had a pact, much like the one I think I’ve made with you. Hey, daydream, though the boys were harsh and cornered us. Though our mothers didn’t protect the girls. We love those girls, would fill our lives with them.
Sanctuary
Under oak. Light that opens like an eyelid to the same trunks, same patch on leaf or leafmeal, then closes. Then opens. The same stuttering pink light. Someone arrives with luggage. Someone has plans to make the best use of her time. And then the time is done. All the eternals—having a father, a mother—are changing form, leaving before I’ve really understood them. Yes, this is how things happen: one dreams of strawberries, and they are served today for breakfast. One opens a book to the page, “When my father died.” I think of him this morning, like a fawn in the long grass. Paralyzed by fear after the diagnosis. (He wanted to speak in tongues. He wanted to travel.) Should I mourn him already, while he is still alive? Oh, Visitor, the silver spoons are clanging in and out of the wind. Above, the periodic tabling of thrush. I could never reach him there. Where reach him now?
Sparrow
The dawns are numbered, as I am. Though I remain ever after in a state of surprise, like a child, dumbfounded by the word “Enter.” My name is small, a garden-mint, a sprig to decorate a plate. I rarely try to speak for others, and consider the words I say, not like the mockingbird who repeats banalities, not like the robin, habitual, not like the rabbits who are silent but move loquaciously. Clack of dried pea pods, cloud of mosquitoes, one can have too many roses in the house. The world is loud, anguished by its processes. Though perhaps it is wrong to settle, as I have settled, for the simple meal, the cutting garden, the circumscribed stroll by the pond. When what I want is to sing something monumental. My family is rough. I wish I could smooth them. I have been lucky. Not married out to trash men. But while I sleep, the great winds come. Spruce forest. Pine forest. Fir forest. A door opens. A door slams shut.
Shell
Bluff and double bluff. We could make ourselves sick waiting for this place to open up to us. Polished by our childhoods. Bruises the waves leave. Shell: skinned knee, scraped marble. We know too much about process to try to get around it. What is vital is sometimes hidden inside bone. Bramble of the blackberry that blocks the entrances. As if we weren’t meant to be here, though here we are outside, loud-colored to the heron. Morbid, the idea of rubbing through one’s own skin, yet we yearn to stick our fingers inside. While the dead make their way through the custom lines. Shell: a quiet verb, slowed by its own sound, gull wings dipping over the clam beds. What if they disappeared, these sculpted, painted things? What would we do without their number, their secret congress? This thinking placed outside ourselves has gotten us here, an interior flame-soft, brushed against a cloud, small cloud of bleeding things, gray feathers.
Bamboo
To be almost dead, that careful. Hollow-boned like the birds. Though one is numerous, part of a pack. To expect less of each other. To glade instead of grove, stand instead of grotto. A tender gardener, one might say, who can twist the trellises. Here is where we make our stand, one might say. A body that breathes will eventually make its own noise. For those trying too hard, here is shade. One could live next to people and know one’s presence heals. One could have an empty heart as they do. Bamboo grows straight, marrowless. Look, how we are bent and we have marrow. Down here, the shuffle of leaves barely reaches the still trunks. No matter the words spoken in leaving. Bamboo. It is a child’s word one wants to repeat. One wants to continue to wish the other well.
Delight
A spirit that is limited, small as “I imagine,” one that flutters on the shoulder between concrete and abstract, a bird’s call, not its song, in the distance. It is the fragrance of your voice or the colors in what you say, the floral prints, not the solids. Palms laid out like tables spread, mangos with salt, fried potatoes. It is the feeling you perhaps learned as a child leading your mute twin by the hand, pointing out the yellow-headed blackbirds. Delight you must have learned in order to speak for him. Sweet Heart. Red Clover. Cardinals strung along the fence like paper lanterns. We want to go out in the world no matter what. We want to come back home with plans to plant things. Salutations, oh pigeon! And fireworks for graduation! Pine and fir so we can tell the difference between them. The mind thinks of all the boughs and stars it wants to give, unaware of all that’s lost at the periphery. Dear Epicurean. Dear Carnation. Dear Frivolously Blue.
Ophelia among the Flowers
after Odilon Redon
The body is full of cadences. The garden, in fact. A party, by which I mean candles. Dresses, yes, because it is inside them we want to be, weighing nothing, hair in our eyes, running up the steps to meet a lover. One begins with salutation, something all the old cultures knew. Good night. Good morning. You are a gift to me. One welcomes the ostracized back into the fold by reciting a list of their good deeds. An eyelid closed in sleep might hide the color of this hollyhock, a dark pink silk batiste. Poppy, bright amulet of the blood. But who are these flowers? My friend has died, is dying, might die. I sit in the garden under clouds. Long enough to watch the petals detach in the wind, flutter like fish after touching ground. O, you must wear your rue with a difference, mild and soiled, like silk in heat. Baby’s breath twisted through my hair.
The School of the Dead, the School of Roots, and the School of Dreams
title after Hélène Cixous
White shoot germinating from the burlap seed, wet, dark, deflated now. What is the earth? Rosary of black beads, clumped. A decade between them. Home of the sorrowful and digestive mysteries. My peas didn’t rise. What is under there to maim us, disable us? A sparkle at the deep place as if water pooled there. When I was digging with the spatula, planting the pinks, I struck something hard, skull-like. What is the earth?
