Then one day the gray rags vanish
and the sweet wind rattles her sash.
Her secrets bloom hot. I’m wild for everything.
My body is a golden armor around my unborn child’s body,
and I’ll die happy, here on the ground.
I bend to the mixture of dirt, chopped hay,
grindings of coffee from our dark winter breakfasts.
I spoon the rich substance around the acid-loving shrubs.
I tear down last year’s drunken vines,
pull the black rug off the bed of asparagus
and lie there, knowing by June I’ll push the baby out
as easily as seed wings fold back from the cotyledon.
I see the first leaf already, the veined tongue
rigid between the thighs of the runner beans.
I know how the shoot will complicate itself
as roots fill the trench.
Here is the link fence, the stem doubling toward it,
and something I’ve never witnessed.
One moment the young plant trembles on its stalk.
The next, it has already gripped the wire.
Now it will continue to climb, dragging rude blossoms
to the other side
until in summer fruit like green scimitars,
the frieze of vines, and then the small body
spread before me in need
drinking light from the shifting wall of my body,
and the fingers, tiny stems wavering to mine,
flexing for the ascent.
This is the last month, the petrified forest
and the lake which has long since turned to grass.
The sun roars over, casting its light and absence
in identical seams. One day. Another.
The child sleeps on in its capsized boat.
The hull is weathered silver and our sleep is green and dark.
Dreams of the rower, hands curled in the shape of oars,
listening for the cries of the alabaster birds.
All is silent, the animals hurled into quartz.
Our bed is the wrecked blue island of time and love.
Black steeples, black shavings of magnetized iron,
through which the moon parades her wastes,
drawing the fruit from the female body,
pulling water like blankets up other shores.
Then slowly the sky is colored in, the snow
falls evenly into the blackness of cisterns.
The steel wings fan open that will part us from each other
and the waves break and fall according to their discipline.
Breath that moves on the waters.
Small boat, small rower.
When they were wild
When they were not yet human
When they could have been anything,
I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,
And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.
1
I am here to praise this body
on loan from the gods
by which we know the god in us
and see the god made earth,
pulled out blue and stunned into the lights.
2
Sometimes in the frenzy of first events
there comes to me a strange
declamatory awareness
as though my consciousness has stirred
from the heap of broken toys
and new toys
that is my baby’s existence.
When I look into her eyes I see below
the surface of things
into the water of the other surface
through the layers of that surface
to the original fire.
3
When you wake sometimes, crying
in the pure desolation of the newly realized,
I dream you are drifting off
in your little boat.
I crawl to you like swimming and hold you in my arms
and then I wonder if it was cruel, yes, cruel,
to force you with such violence through my body.
To bring you here.
That is why, when I find you,
I lay my hands upon you
in so tender a way
that you do not feel me quite at first.
I draw you back and you are calmed.
That is why I touch you with a lightness
I can repeat nowhere else.
That is why these anxious pictures
of you, larger every month, and why I call
your name continually,
throwing it out like an anchor.
“Her fear was for her child. Searching all around, she saw the footprints of an enormous frog and with them, the tracks of the little dog, as if he had been dragged along on his paws. She knew then that it was the Frog Woman who had stolen her baby and knew by the tracks that the little dog had tried to hold back the cradle board with his teeth.”
——from “Wampum Hair,” a story told by Nawaquay-geezhik (Charles Kawbawgam)
1 Transformation
My husband was a prince who kissed me
until my eyes bulged and my skin
melted to a green film on my bones.
My mouth split my face
and I croaked,
take me, oh take me.
So I was, deeper
into my startling new body.
As I sank back onto the wet springs
of my haunches, as I powerfully gathered
my tongue unfolded in a blur,
a sticky lasso,
and plucked a fly from his lapel—
my last wifely act.
2 Control
At first, I hated this body,
my lung-thin skin, my temptress spots.
I wanted red silk and you gave me this!
Advantages—my bones are bendable straws
through which I drink sun,
golden yolk, food of inner life, heat, tremendous wish.
And there is night and the many voices
seething delirium
universal mirrors that are my eyes
implacable gold
What you change cannot love you.
I told him that. He kissed me anyway.
3 Origin
I was hungry, so the author of all things
gave me the flies of sorrow to eat.
Gave me the underslung heroic couplets
of a man’s breast to drink from.
Gave me the perfect nothing
of my own original soul
to dive and dive in never touching bottom.
Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like
to be truly lovely
to dance by candlelight and tear the filmy cotton lace
off my nipples and draw you in.
Sometimes I have the memory of what it was like
to be another kind of food.
4 King Black Snake
My god, my predator,
to get away from you I change shapes.
I become the laughter at my core.
My breasts are soft.
My hair is dull.
I am growing into the body
of the old woman who will bear me
toward my death,
my death which will do me no harm.
Every day the calico cat returns from the fields
with a mouse in her jaws.
After every bite of the tender lawn, the ground squirrel
jerks and flinches,
but no hawk drops out of the sky.
The fat creature continues to eat, nervously
stuffing itself with pleasure.
I watch him as I drink from a bottle of grassy wine.
Why do I long
to be devoured and to forget
in life rather than in death?
What is the difference?
I won’t drink wine tonight
I want to hear what is going on
not in my own head
but all around me.
I sit for hours
outside our house on Blind Mountain.
Below this scrap of yard
across the ragged old pasture,
two horses move
pulling grass into their mouths, tearing up
wildflowers by the roots.
They graze shoulder to shoulder.
Every night they lean together in sleep.
Up here, there is no one
for me to fail.
You are gone.
Our children are sleeping.
I don’t even have to write this down.
I have moved beyond my life
into the blueness of the tiny flower
called Sky Pilot.
The sheer stain of the petals
fills the sky in my heart.
Over the field,
two bluebirds pause
on shivering wings.
They could as well have been a less glorious
color, and the flowers too.
Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,
if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?
for Persia
Under ledge, under tar, under fill
under curved blue stone of doorsteps,
under the aggregate of lakebed rock,
under loss and under hard words,
under steamrollers
under your heart,
it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.
The seeds of thistles
push from nowhere, forming a rose of spikes
that spreads all summer until it
stands in a glory of
needles, blossoms, blazing
purple clubs and fists.
I’m brave.
I’m kind.
These are our powers.
Boys are coming!
How about we lead them into a trap and run?
We’re both the bravest twins.
Identicals.
Only you like blue.
And I like orange.
Remember you have to act like
me and I have to act like you?
Don’t kill the spider.
I forgot the crocodile hole!
We both can’t die.
Our special rope tells us what to do.
I got you. I won’t let you fall.
I’ll shoot the jump rope over to the other side.
The king is chasing.
The rainstorm has heard our plan. Oh,
they are following us. We will have no choice
but to marry now. You will be a daughter.
I will be the rainstorm’s wife.
But watch out.
The king has poisonous teeth.
for Aza
Little blue eyeglasses,
I give you the honored task
of assisting my youngest daughter
in her work, which is to see not only
general shapes but specific details
and minute variations in the color and texture
of objects ranging from immense
(Ocean. Sky.) To very tiny.
(Invertebrate hidden at edge of carpet)
Little blue eyeglasses,
I charge you with the solemn responsibility
of depth perception. Guide her steps
through dim corridors
and allow her to charge down
the staircase into my arms
without injury. Above all,
little blue eyeglasses,
train her eyes upon the truth
and let her eyes rest in the truth
and help her see within the truth the strength
to bear the truth.
Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling
home over twisted ice.
Whiteness drifts over your house.
A page of warm light
falls steady from the open door.
Here is your bed, folded open.
Lie down, lie down, let the blue snow cover you.
for Abel
The sky glows yellow over the tin hump
of Mount Anaeus, and below on the valley floor
the fog cracks and lifts.
Beyond it the throat of the river flares.
The river shakes its body
of terminal mirrors.
I saw you walk down the mountain yesterday.
You were wearing your stained blue jacket,
your cheap, green boots.
You disappeared into a tree
the way you always did, in grief.
I went looking for you.
In the orchard floored with delicate grass,
I lay down with the deer.
A sweet, smoky dust rose
from the dead silver of firs.
When I stand in the circle of their calm black arms
I talk to you. I tell you everything.
And you do not weep.
You accept
how it was
night came down.
Ice formed on your eyelids.
How the singing began, that was not music
but the cold heat of stars.
Wind runs itself beneath the dust like a hand
lifting a scarf.
Mother, you say, and I hold you.
I tell you I was wrong, I am sorry.
So we listen to the coyotes.
And their weeping is not of this earth
where it is called sorrow, but of another earth
where it is known as joy,
and I am able
to walk into the tree of forgiveness with you
and disappear there
and know myself.