EXILE
Not
because of the nightingales who stole me at birth.
Not
because of the woman who whistles to me from the arroyo
late
at night when I am in the bathtub
submerged
beneath the glass still surface.
Not
because I plucked the buffalo grass
from
the cracks of the gas station’s asphalt
and
fastened it into my sister’s hair.
Not
because I crammed her antelope
into
the chambers of the sky
just
so I could walk beneath
a
dress of twinkling garnets.
Not
because all the rims of the night are cracking
and
it is still beautiful.
Not
because I do not want to die like this
inside
the tin palace in my shadow.
Not
because memory
is
the chrysanthemum in my closet
and
I am mapping its absence on the walls of my room.
Not
because I needed a room, the dream
of
a room, the digging for its artesian wells,
the
striking of bone and dust.
Not
because I dream in the desert, where a range of ghosts
billow
the dunes and I am trapped inside
their
spiraling fossils, alone beneath a blue
rippling
sky, the streams of geese a silk wind passing.
Not
because some days I can only manage
to
sit on the porch with a cigarette,
watching
my tin house rust in the rain, its dark
petals
washing into gutters.
Not
because my sister had wanted to be a dancer
and
now I pluck her from me like a harp string.
Not
because the longhorns lower their heads
in
the gray diagonal rain where I walk
across
their plains, an umbrella flared out
beneath
the shattered sky, counting
the
last hour’s falling fractals.
Not
because I have made things I cannot carry alone;
have
learned to be at home in countries
whose
languages I do not speak.
Not
because the freight trains
carrying
pottery and bits of teeth
are
crossing the homeless territory
where
I wait with my bags packed at a dusty station.
Not
because I write this while
peering
through a portal as the moon
disappears
behind the night hunter’s wing.
Not
because I live here
in
the somewhere in between.
THE QUICKENING
1. Apples
In
the drooping orchard, they are plump as
pomegranates. I am watching the crows,
their
broad wings rising
slow
above the branches, beaks
pecking
into jewel white flesh. It is late
November. My stomach is stretched
like
a canvas of winter
where
birds spit skin onto the browning
grass
as I lie beneath the frozen limbs,
undulating
with the thought of
pomegranates,
of what it would be
to
be inside a bed of glistening
fuchsia
seeds as a tongue
slides
over me,
breaking
me into juice.
And
I will vanish on the murmuring
page
of night, watching my reflection
in
the dark and drafty window
where
I cannot take your face off.
A
crow, on a crown of cedar
is cawing out for her other wing.
She lifts,
wraps
her dark dream over my bones,
winnows the seeds.
2. Moon
Uprooting
the body is effortless.
I
awake, light-headed
without
memory.
Carry
the trash to the curbside.
Lower
my eyes as the gardener
waves. Another dream
abandoned
to the cluttered highway.
Windows
in the arroyo.
Wildflowers
of the city’s waste.
Walking
off-center down the gravel road,
I
leave a trail of tubular seeds.
A scrawl of
wind
on a page of dust. My uterus
trembles
in the dirt and weeds.
Its
vessels like new shoots torn out of me.
I
take a deep breath.
Latch
up my dress.
Write: how
bright the moon in my chest.
3. Boundary Water
Because
I woke with no word
from
the stream beneath my skin
and
I was holding your bones in my hands.
Because
I am writing your story into a dense
grove,
scaffolding a body plucked
and
globed. Hips
crushed
into bruised
soil. A child
wrapped
in the net
of
my breast.
Because
I call her Aloneness –
the
word on the tongue, the same word as
watercolor, desert-scape,
taupe line, the many shades of
stone
copperheads sleep beneath.
Because
I slipped across
the
indistinct shadow looking for your shore.
Couldn’t
make out the grease black rock from waters
after
twilight. Make sound as you cross, you said
in
copper light, barefoot four stones ahead of me.
You will be safer if they
can hear you
coming. Because I woke to your grown planet
inside
my skeleton. Awoke to a singing that
shattered
its own shell. I extract
the
scarab, carapace ripped,
from
my mouth. Crush
the
silk wheat hull on the table.
Crumple
the page of her breath.
4. Companion
In
the erupted doorways of the pre-light,
I
walk into the frozen orchards
carrying
your writing instruments.
I
am gathering cores in the empty
baskets. A black wing crossing the page of snow
fills
your tracks with shadow.
I
look for the moon through the naked
branches,
but see only your face
from
the center of a cold body.
I
call for the crow from the lattice of trees.
I
tempt her with memories of gleaming
apples. It is
imperative that you tear this up,
she
caws, nuzzling her beak
deep
inside me and spitting
the
seeds onto the forest floor,
because there is no place
for a heart
like yours in this world where the sun
in
the morning through the frosted window is
shattering
and brilliant with the
prism
of your ghost, drumming in the
hollows
of my crushed body again.
5. Exile
Sirens
are gathering
apples
in their tents.
They
spit the scraps of my
eyes
into the fire, string
my
hair through the cemetery trees.
Dawn
flares in the stained glass windows
and
alights my palms like a cross of flames.
Beneath
the teeth of ravens, a little girl
runs
into the crevice of the sunrise, slips
down
into the pre-light.
In
the cathedral of my chest,
a
quickening of wings.
WOMAN ON THE STREET WITH LAUNDRY
In the birdcage of dusk the
gray
pigeons gather. The bus is late. The evening
crowds. I wait beneath the
purpling
shroud of fog, search for
the moon
in the oil-slicked puddles,
but it is only
the headlamps of cars washing
over.
Dragging my laundry like a
bag of
stones, I cannot go further
than this
plexiglass shelter, the
left-behind shadows
stickered to the walls where
beside me
a woman peels her clothes
off like petals.
The crows are trembling in
her skeleton tree.
They beat their tattered
wings against
the darkening bruise of
sky. I drop
a dollar into her paper cup
and sit on the
cold bench clutching my
body. The shadow
is the most un-lonely of
spaces. It has a boundary
like water. The moonlight
dips its pail in it and shatters
our reflections. But here under streetlamps it
trails us and we follow,
like this woman
brushing past me with her
empty
shopping cart as the vacant
all-night
laundromat whirs its white
lights and the tide of
night crashes over my ragged
little shadow.
I drop two coins in the
murky reflection.
My laundry is tossed like
bouquets of
ashes as the pigeons
scatter from the heaping
gutters.
Detached now, my shadow is a
puddle of
stars like booze shooters
crushed in old
laundrywomen’s hands. My
imprint in tar is
teeming with feathers. My body
is moonlight rippling clean.
