it was so young
a mouse
that it did not try
to run when she lifted
her sharp paw,
and perhaps therefore bored,
she ate it straightaway
which would have been
a kindness, except
that she began
from the tail
and took her time,
and we watched,
fretting & turning
away, then back again,
as it stretched its little
forepaws out,
and out,
its tiny sounds
getting smaller,
until finally
she swallowed them whole.
We came in from the field
yellow to our knees in dandelion
sex. Got to find somebody
to hay down there,
before the grass gets too high;
got to find some way
to spin so much wildness
into gold.
Well, I wrote thirty poems in thirty days. I’m not overly fond of most of them, but there are a few that I think will be worth revisiting.
It was a good exercise, good to be pushed a little and good to be writing even though I’m overworked and underslept and even though I wasn’t overly fond of most of them. I like writing poems; I’d sort of forgotten that. And some of them came out ok. Are there any you’d like to see polished up?
Dear Cancer: Back
the fuck off.
Get your grimy hands
off the people I love.
Breasts are for babies
and foreplay
and low-cut shirts;
quit making them
into grenades that
may or may not
be live, that may
or may not be death.
Today I learned
that too much light
at the wrong time
can invite you in -
are we really so finely
wrought, so delicately
tuned? Already I fear
soybeans and off-
gassing and non-organic
milk. Already the question
is less “Whether” and more
“Which?”
and
“When?”
My grandmother
joked she didn’t need them
anymore, fifty years and more
past her last nursling, &
they’d always been a bother
anyway. In adolescence
I’d hoped to have
her busty genes,
but now I don’t.
The residues of pesticides
were in my daughter’s blood
before her birth, and our
linoleum is probably
asbestos. Fuck you anyway,
and keep out.
Just beyond the hollow
where the marsh
funnels itself
into creek,
there is
a scent like
California, just
like a chaparral hill
after a rainstorm, and
I can’t figure out why, and
I can’t stop walking over to that place.
I cut six branches
off the crabapple,
to bring inside
and force to bloom.
Spring is too slow
and I do not wish
to wait.
The leaves unfurl,
magenta, bronze. The buds
lift up their heads.
But no flowers come. Instead
they wither,
blacken and fall.
This is not a metaphor
for my life, which is happy
most of the time.
Perhaps
a reminder
to let some things be.
The scaffolding
upon which the family
was built. The immutable object,
the elemental force.
The love like a lighthouse light,
sometimes too bright to bear,
sometimes the only thing
in a sea of darkness,
& always revealing me
for just who I am.
I did not always want
to be revealed,
to be myself.
I did not want to be absolutely loved.
But you kept on shining,
on all of us, a beacon that said,
You can only be yourself,
so be a better one,
you only get this one chance,
don’t let anybody take it,
don’t fuck it up,
don’t waste it.
It is a lot to ask of a child,
that she be her own and only self.
I still flinch sometimes to hear
the word Potential.
But no matter how far
I fled, I never lost
the reach of that light.
I can always see it.
It always leads me home.
Dear Mama: Thank you
for letting me hear
the fear in your voice.
I know now how strong
is the desire to be strong,
the need to be invincible
because Mother
is the first refuge,
and must not fall.
I think I was in high school
the last time I woke fearful
and crept into your bed –
the headache that wouldn’t end,
a tingling in my foot
that turned to numbness,
and the need for your soft hands
and shushing. I did not know
that motherhood
is the process of being asked
for more than you have to give,
then giving it. Then finding you have more.
In preschool,
we dripped paint
onto wet coffee filters
and the color spread and spread
like magic, drawing itself out.
You love me like that,
like I love my daughter,
love drawing itself out,
expanding to fill every pore.
And now I am grown,
and you are weary and afraid,
not invincible, not immortal
as the child believes
her parent must be.
But a new kind of refuge –
I am still learning
from you how to be
a person in the world,
a woman
and a mother
and a wife,
and you are still teaching me
bravery,
and honesty.
Dear Mama, thank you
for taking me in
every time,
for showing me how
to brim over with color
and with love,
& thank you for saying
Not so good
when I asked.
Thank you for trusting me
with the friendship
of your fear;
I know now
how strong
is the need
to be strong,
how hard it is
to let it fall away.
Dear feet: thank you
for all your weary days,
the concrete floors of restaurant
kitchens and café bars,
the high heels, the cowboy boots.
The cowboy boots when I was
thirty-six weeks and
forty-pounds pregnant.
Thank you for taking me
up the Mogollon Rim, the Grand Canyon,
Nevada Falls, and the stairs
to my daughter’s room each night.
You are a miracle
of engineering, the long bones
and the short bones,
the bend and flex,
the weight and balance. I do not
rub you enough.
