Collection

 

All the men I pass, in their cars, in shops, are mine.

The streets teeming with them, their fur, their wit’s end.

How everyone is a piece of a man

I’ve known before. How they still move

through me, small bits caught in my net–

a screen, a sieve. I make a mosaic of them,

the detritus left arranged on a mat to catch the light

with the sky so high and blue today it is singing.

Today, men are wind chimes, men are cars wheeling

through the snow while cold air rushes off the snowfall

in an effort to hold everything back from falling.

Today, men are toy towers, are lampposts.

The man across the street shrugs his mornings

loosely, shovels himself out. The ice a mirror cast

like a tie slung around his neck. The man my father,

wearing his mornings like a navy suit.

The man my mother, wearing her anger

like a bold red lip. Even in clothes, the men are naked.

Even in women. You can see them in their houses at night—

circling each other like tigers, sitting at their tables,

lying on their couches, crouching below the window sills.

You can see the way winter moves between them,

The way they claw the walls.

 

 

 

Self Portrait with Sparrow Song

 

Wide green fields leaning towards gray water

and the song in the underbrush just beyond

the tree line. You were bidden here. Song of the cedar branch,

song of the long summer morning. Fan your feathers out

like your grandmother’s Hermes scarf, a silk tail

of pink and brown lines. Follow it up the soft back

nearly broken by love. Song of the curtains closed to the sun.

Follow it to the place where the bus would drop you

along the road with its peepers, its trophy wives

and masturbators. Song of the squeaky bed. Follow it

across the atlas in a zig zag until you come to the man.

Song of memory housed in our shared bones. Follow it to the house

that would birth you. Song of your daughter, waking.

Taking your face in her hands. Follow it until you come back

to this branch, heavy with summer, light with needles about to drop.

Song of the sparrow, the wren, their voices blue as the ash

of your old life. Song of your old life set free by your new.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes from a Borrowed Field

 

Once I came near enough to the earth

to taste its skin—the smooth of stone

to the tongue, like waiting for nearness,

for someone to come and pick me

as if my eyes were apple blossoms.

I imagined that I would find a field

to fall into: Columbines with crooked stems,

Foxtail leaning sideways in wind,

sunlight gleaming from a broken spoke,

and name that field my own: Azurite, Onyx,

as if my space was all mineral, all tooth

and earth. There would be something solitary,

something infinite, a deposit of belonging

staked into soil. I would dress up for it,

wearing my difference

as a stone wears its edges, as seed wears its skin,

ready to be carved, to split open.

 

But the city still rents me—

gas stations and street signs, skate ponds,

busses, the shared stairways.

I’m still waiting for the moment

when push becomes shove,

never enough time or money to plant,

to bloom.