Category: Poetry

I am writing to tell you

that the apple blossoms have opened

and, for a moment, made clouds

out of the trees. rain has swept

the cherry’s petals 

into great muddy drifts

where they will linger, for now,

in a deficit of brooms—or rather

of hands and arms to sweep them.

 

we are become molluscs, in a way,

curled up soft and moist

within our shells. sound

reverberates . . .

When I was younger,

say twelve or thirteen.

 

I asked my preacher Dad

“How does God sound when he speaks to a mortal man like you?”

 

He said “Try to talk with water in your mouth,

multiply the rumble you make by infinity.

 

Try to read a message of inverted alphabets

arranged backwards and italized like birds standing on a rope.

 

Imagine the mighty . . .

Already, the sunlight is shrinking like an old shirt

that barely covers the belly, even while it glows

gilding the dried up cattails, the snapped branches

that pierce the cloudless sky like a severed bone.

 

Only smudges of light left on the slick leaves

languishing in icy mud, and on the rushing squirrels,

newly fattened for their long, incredible fast. . . .

come, sit on the mountain, and

watch us speak to the stars.

 

their language is

morse code and phasic shifts;

we paint in roads and villages

and the hum of high-voltage

transformers, we murmur

in street lamps and stadiums

and the ill-mannered leak

of a window.

 

like shouting through high wind,

we are veiled

by clouds and magnetic storms and

the jealous . . .

bleach blonde was the look of the summer: 

colorless skeleton of polyps and aging fish spines.

rocks smoothly slate gray as salt water

grinds it down; it had no algal coat to protect and

nourish, no obsidian shelled mussels hanging off

the edges, beating themselves to the rhythm of the tide.

 

the moon rises and so the tide flows, warming waves

crashed, . . .

We are sorry for the way this will arrive,

damp and damagesome. No doubt

the peculiar constitutions of our nations,

catastrophically susceptible to each other,

account for the long gap in correspondence

though here we find no record of any sort

to suggest a former, well-established channel.

That is, however, the way of our state;

we operate, as you can see, impromptu, . . .

My fiancée’s aunt takes us to look for owls.

We wear ice cleats. New family, new ways,

but I’m an indoor cat (cats are another thing

I’ve had to learn). I am new at this, new

as the ring on my finger, but my love

puts on earmuffs and glows in the full moon.

I pull up my hood. We stand in a circle

and strain for owl calls. Who-cooks-for-you?

Who-cooks-for-you? my new aunt . . .

maybe ground is meant to ripple

and sag like skin showing

 

her age. the wisdom

of roots aching to surface

 

maybe we’re meant to stumble

and break blades made for vain

 

manicuring to steep amazement

in unpredictable growth

 

you downed nana cottonwood onto

teenaged limbs, too young

 

to hold weighted life, a shock

of white, stripped . . .