Pastoral
Round stones
Could be sheep.
Round sheep
Could be stones.
Once in a while
The stones move.
Sheep? Or the slow
Movement of stones
Sliding over silt
After we stopped
Looking
How We Live Now
I have heard lately, more than once, of men falling out of their beds.
Sometimes they hurt themselves falling out of bed and so resort
to sleeping on the floor.
And I have heard as well that the women, living with the men
who fall out of their beds, are forced to sleep alone
because the force that forces these men to fall out of their beds
is dangerous to the women they sleep next to.
I have heard lately, of women eating dinner alone because the men
who fall out of their beds and sleep on the floor
go to sleep very early and so are not awake when the women
are hungry.
Don’t you think these are strange times? We are wearing our masks
indoors.
When the women eat alone, they become particular. The place setting
just so, the candles lit, one glass of wine, one piece of
chocolate to end the meal. This is how we live. This is what
we have come to.
St Anthony's Fire
rosemary, cork, oak myrtle, sweet
eucalyptus, pine
branches upon fir branches
a mound piled taller
than I am, taller
than the house I live in
and from the center one
living tree bare of branches
proud as
Giordano Bruno
in the Campo dei Fiori, a man
tall and cowled they
burned him
for thinking too much
of infinite earths every star
a sun
In Galtelli, in the center of town
they light the fire slowly
it starts to burn one side bright
one side shadow
always and in
all things one side bright and
one side shadow
and now I must go, they say
three times around the fire,
until I sweat like the devil
in the heat
until I taste the first
fist of hot ash
in my bitten mouth
Time Travel
Someday in what we now
call the future
I will write a poem or an
essay or a story
that begins with the line
“That first winter
it snowed often and I was
already edging
my way into being old.”
At that time
in the future I will no longer
pass beyond
what’s called “the dummy
light” to the other
side of the street
to have delicate blonde
streaks woven into
my dyed brown hair.
I will let myself turn
silver and amazed.
I will recall that I read
mysteries one after
another late into the night
hoping that
they would help me
understand
betrayals I didn’t
yet understand.
That winter
of frequent snow
it was unconscionably
cold
and I was also
unconscionably cold, as if
warmth would come at too
high a price.
That winter the snow
seemed beyond relief,
clutched in the naked
arms of trees.
I was edging into age.
I was tentative
Like a young girl
learning
to line her eyes with shadow
for the first time.
That winter the snow clung
to the trees
and tumbled into the river
that rushed past
the place where I lived.
Habitual
In the circle of light that interrupts the early dark she pursues foreign mysteries. Do not take this as metaphor. Rather, she, the writer, has become obsessed, it’s fair to say, with mystery novels written by people she doesn’t know set in places she’s never seen. The crimes are appalling – serial murder pursued as performance art. Spike-loaded apples, aberrant snowmen, and so on. Clues are heavy on archetype. Some readers will recognize the allusions. It doesn’t matter, though; the point is clear enough. Murders in books are acts of imagination
but after a while the mysteries become quotidian. The writer acquires mysteries with increasing frequency, first delaying the purchase to avoid guilt, then acquiring a mystery almost every day because the pleasure is too intense to refuse. She learns that serial murderers begin to leave less and less time between crimes because the kick doesn’t last. The writer understands this. The body gone, there is only language. Serial murderers leave notes, write in code. They grow increasingly impatient. They hate the dark. They want to be found.
Confusion of Tongues
When I said “constellation” my friend heard “consolation” and my friend was not far wrong. I was talking about the constellations of words that form the grounding of my so-called work (life), my consolations. Thus: light and heat, heat and light, light and air, water and light, fire and light, air and light, light and light.
Dimorphic
In a tree near the water
a smart patch of red. It
makes sense to remark
on the season but the red
flashes by as does
the feathered plume
of a male blackbird’s wing.
Arrival, flight, then gone.
Vectors
Ella, the cat, on the ledge, on the edge of discovery. Her eyes follow an uncharacteristic
helicopter until it flies out of the window frame. A matter of prepositions or the novel
proposition that what remains outside of direct perception is a lure of sorts. See the turn
of head, the arched neck, the quivering body of the small cat. Her hunt for what can’t be
seen or known. I love what’s off the edge of the page. It leads somewhere. Now the
helicopter gone, now the empty grey sky. The quivering persists until late in the day.
Nepenthe
We, two women, moving into old age, speak of disappointments. We are too discreet to name them but agree that one must learn to live with disappointments. “We don’t get everything we want,” my companion says, affirming my mother’s admonition: “Whoever said your desires need to be fulfilled?” I was shocked then, not at all shocked now. We are on the way to Nepenthe at Big Sur. Nepenthe is named after a fictional drug of healing: a drug meant to erase pain. We arrive and climb what seems like an infinity of stairs leading towards the sky. We reach the top, turn, and look down. The view of ocean and docks and the small pond nestled below cannot be described except to say there is no disappointment. Ocean and sky, scrubbed rocks, small pond – words cannot contain the landscape or the feeling it evokes. My companion points to the pond, cloudy as the eye of God, and says, “When I die, my soul will go there.” “Yes,” I say. And then she says, “and after a while I will just disappear.”