this whole before consciousness,
this evanescence resetting the world
one loss at a time.
It was apprehension before I could name it,
and then it was after,
and already she was thirteen,
carrying buckets of feed stall to stall,
calling out to the roan, the bay,
in a voice strangely like my own.
Before separation and its invention of longing,
there was the silence where she once woke
patiently staring up at me
as if I was a place the sky should have been.
And of that drowse and lush permission
almost nothing remains.
Only my banishment.
Only a glimpse, now and then,
out my car window
of a girl cantering along the farmer’s slough.
The Raccoon
Dusk wakes the den beneath the house.
A female climbs from the congregational warmth,
her ringed tail sweeping the deck.
At the glass doors, she stares in,
lifts onto her haunches.
Around us, our clothes are scattered
like ephemera, like the moment
turning physical before it vanishes.
On the table, our meal untouched.
Wineglasses glint through a spill of light.
Behind her, we can hear the sea
rework the silence.
It’s not exactly starting over,
but whatever breaks the body
into handfuls of flesh and time, flaw and blessing,
has summoned its hopeful shadow
near the joining, has left us watching
her dark hands at the door.
We Sit in a Beached Rowboat
beside each other, facing out to sea.
Just beyond us, the dock has broken free
so that the rotted planks of the ramp
fall now, unworshipped, into deep water.
How deftly one version has vanished—
our daughters standing there in nightgowns and boots,
their flashlights trained on a wild boil of shiners,
or lying on the sun-warmed deck,
shirts pulled up,
setting a handful of newts free
across each other’s skin.
Already those children are too far away,
too small to rescue, and it is growing dark.
In the cliffs above us, the deer rise up
from their crushed beds of grass.
Around them, rings of blue gilia
shut their delicate purses of seed.
Soon Venus and the North Star
will enter the sky’s deepening meadow.
Already this is the version
where time is made beautiful
with waiting.
Where everything breakable in you
appears to me so often,
so easily now—
Leave-Taking
How suddenly good-bye occupies the deepest place in us.
So the shy ghosts of deer stop and stare
at chrysalis and leaf jitter shifting in the vast fires of wind.
All being is processional. It makes a sound like a scar,
the path poorly translated into corridors of willow.
Already our truck, loaded with mattresses and cookpans,
grinds one last time over the cattle guards onto the highway.
Behind us, darkness plumps the emptiness.
Touches with all its plant and animal hands
through a diaspora of doors. If only we could stay,
listening to claws clicking on the linoleum, an army
of mandibles dissembling the weathered timbers,
we’d see the outside has waited so long to enter
that now it arrives like prophecy, a wild fecundity
taking up where it left off—
wood-rats weaving strands of our hair into nests,
bats chiming through shattered windows,
comet scars ripening in a roofless bowl of sky.
Eventually
There will be a reckoning with joy and its aftershock:
a family poised together under the burn of pistache,
finches gathered on the lawn like a latch in sunlight.
And though there will be no tragedy beyond the usual unfastening,
it will begin with wind turning the pages of dominion,
and children, dressed as soldiers,
marching lantern-like into a gone summer. Afterwards,
a heron will groan as it unfolds over the bay,
water glistening like skin beneath an opened blouse,
cantering a quarterhorse through the farmer’s fields.
Nothing exotic or unbound,
no unseemly disclosures or armies rising up
like crop circles around them—no, it will be an ordinary
banishment, rich with surrender,
desire splitting the joinery into time.
And yet, for a while under the trembling pistache,
a man and woman will hold hands, dazed
and small, wondering how abundance vanishes so quickly
into a sky carved with birds, a winged and yellow chaos
exploding into air, drifting slowly down.
V
music despite everything
Tahoe Wetlands
Here the ground sings,
the marshes whir with invisible coots and swans.
Here the self is a flyway
over the hieroglyphics of wheel and track,
and the winged husk that was my hovering
just beyond his body’s piston.
Each summer these rice fields burn to carbon.
Each winter, rain pours into the rutted cradles
the way the nurse
passed her hands across the bruise
his gun forced into my thigh.
Time is like this kind of light,
equal parts ravage and mercy
striking the berm black, the brush gold,
the molten edges
lifting a flock of tundra swans
into the Sierra’s remote shoulders.
Finally, the years have drained his shadow
into the pond’s mirror-finish. Now all that remains
is what vengeance spawned:
a wish like bones
scattered after the kill,
a voice pulled from ice, wind rattling the cattails.
If you could have seen me that morning—
new mother, new wife,
crawling this half mile over mud
into my soon-to-be
ex-husband’s arms, you might ask,
Is the violence over? No,
first the self must join prayers
with its collapse. No, it takes a long time
to learn how to lose everything.
Tahoe City, 1988
I want to tell it again as the story of two lovers
meeting in a park just before winter,
a light frost crusting the fields.
I want him to appear small and forsaken
beneath the immense vault of the Sierras,
his hood pulled away from his face.
A kingdom of starlings
lifts from the nearly bare branches,
one wave of disturbance becoming another,
as he watches me run, his hands in his pockets,
and I want him frozen between doubt
and a blaze of desire.
As for those birds setting back down,
I want the last few leaves they’ve knocked into air
to fall as apology, an error in tense.
And even if I can’t decide
whether sun kindles the lawn,
or the first snow is waiting just under the hour,
every story must happen in time.
In time his gun slips from its sheath,
presses cold to my temple.
Here, no language for asking,
no jacket to lay between dirt and my face.
And because truth is a current
that both enters and carries the story,
here the story wrestles with silence,
and here it returns as a ghost,
as he shoves his gun back in his pocket,
bends to my ear, wet lips muttering,
“That’s all I wanted,”
his boots kicking up a clatter of birdsong,
a feather sifting violet over the trail.
Ode to Fruit Flies
They lend a sparse fur to the air
just above the bananas,
or hover like a small cloud
over the cut daffodils on my table,
while two or three
tread wings in a glass of wine.
Urge and urge and urge, Whitman wrote
about the coming apart,
the coming differently back again.
When I woke this morning
there were yellow tulips opening in the garden.
I stood at the sink, filling the kettle,
and looked out at each corseted flower.
In my dream, wind was tossing a child
between trees, and my father had returned
from death
to catch her just in time. Sometimes
I need the truth close and in my face.
Sometimes when I no longer wish
to be diminished, the very air flares—
sudden hallelujahs
strung like jostled, tiny lanterns
across the changing mind of sky.
Songbird
Listen—
nothing is more damned than joy.
Like the fine pain of a papercut
on the lips of a desperate plea,
let it enter—
the unheard falling of a colossal pine
and its armature, its delicate green ceilings
adrift on a cloud of earth.
If the idea of delay is prayer,
if the sky suffers in its weightless swinging
between branches, perhaps song itself
is a prelude to brokenness—
velvet indentation
of something thrown down,
a vireo floating face up in grass
like a small excerpt of silence,
a golden visible
lashed to a darker wing.
Listen—even if narcissus burn
in acrid welters of yolk and petal,
even if the orchard
explodes in downy shrapnel,
still, the world was made from divided parts
and passed through
on its way to a larger shining.
Yes to the Youth at an Outdoor Concert
Because today they are everywhere, supple
and flushed with something just lit.
Even the cows raise their heads from the fields to stare.
The boys are shirtless, their backs sinewy and marbled.
And the girls in sundresses, all slope and cleavage
like these mounded hills fired up
in the extravagance of mustard, new grass.
Sure, they will drink too much, redden and burn.
In the car behind me, there is the flare
of a lighter, a pipe passed around.
But this is the hour of the zenith.
This is the first afternoon of real heat
when the forget-me-nots and columbine and bush lupine
clamor and swell, the mule ears flare,
when new buds turn inside out the earth’s hunger,
fragile arches of the petals
offering up a thousand little doors.
And why not enter wherever you can?
Why not let them dive together
into another round of joy and longing,
before they learn the names for brevity?
Why not gather up a kingdom of the newly risen
and rub their bodies together into fire?
Garden Party as the Prow of a Small Ship Traveling
Above the blue-glass goblets,
mismatched plates, something winged but crying persists.
Presses in on a June evening,
the tornado warning finally lifted, the ribeye cooked
to rare perfection. Kumquats burn
inside the tree’s low cage like a brilliance troubled into fire.
Someone has marinated oranges
in wine. Wrapped trout in bacon. Someone says,
They are probably owlets
in a nestbox, frightened and hungry, so that now the cries
separate into three, you think,
one a little higher, one more rhythmic against the third
screeching for the parent wings,
the fresh kill. On the roof, a hivebox hums.
Someone built those bees
a cupboard, those owls a box, as if to make a sanctuary
deep inside creation
as it unravels, layer upon accelerating layer.
Someone asks you to pass
your plate. Now take a different vantage,
say from infinity’s lookout.
There, destruction has its opportunities for variance. Look
at those Icelandic poppies,
their fanfare and ruddy cups ruthlessly throwing themselves
open, the star-threads of columbine
sipping at the unforeseen. Look at the sensual doors
of the mouths beside you,
opening and closing around the edges of pleasure,
a hoisted cake lit by candles,
voices gathered into an arsenal of the colloquial,
the well-intentioned. Yes,
everyone is born inside time’s appetite for more.
Live, live, live, you hear
in the homesick hour of the clock, hurry, hurry, hurry,
in the warning minutes
of the hatchlings, their audible derangement vexing
the night’s thickening stars.
Variations on Rupture and Repair: Horse
It was summer, whatever that was—
slow landscape of heat and sprinklers,
the last cherries falling in a bloody circle
around the tree, the sound of a firing range
just beyond the pines.
My daughter had asked me to turn out
the coal black horse—
his enormous hooves like iron hammers,
his sweat-damp flanks like cannons
locked against my shoulders.
And my heart, that clock of many inside one,
banging away
as if to build itself another shelter,
a better one with fewer doors.
I stepped inside his stall and took the rope,
calling out his name.
Swallows rustled in the rafters, dust spiraling after.
He laid his muzzle across my shoulder
the way a fine wind touches sand,
the heat and scent of the world in him.
And he neither led nor followed,
but plodded so close beside me
his darkness kept knocking mine,
as if carrying something of the unbearable
between us until it could be borne.
Interlude
In September, the wind surprisingly warm
after such a cool summer, we stand in the farmer’s fields
and pick the last blackberries to make it into ripeness.
Shaft and aftershaft of clouds wheel across the pasture.
Vultures circle like winged erasers.
Angry marks crosshatch your arms, but you refuse a jacket,
meaning, you want to feel the thorns, the irrevocable flowering.
The part of time no one can t
ouch.
Deeper in, I find a hollowed-out copse of cattails
where the blacktail sleep, a few seeds of milkweed drifting down.
What if there is no death, only moments looking elsewhere?
What if this is what listening does—
the hour dissembled down to its smallest eternity,
the still light of dusk slipping like water over Black Mountain?
As for my can of berries, poorly ripened, but brimming,
they have traveled a particular weather
to reach this chirring, all the small particles of sound
changing into evening,
a few bats flying out like black kites between the trees.
And you, who have had your share of sorrow,
the kind that complicates the body, dirties the spirit,
call back in answer
from deep inside this lush and sharpened thicket,
Yes, I have more than enough,
and mean it.
Variations on Rupture and Repair: Cottage
Hidden inside ceanothus
and a bed of wild poppies,
it was unlocked
when we knocked, entered in.
I want to say we touched nothing.
That the silence inside that strange room
did not say, Lie down, undress,
while our vigilance sorted out the tonalities
of a crow outside the window
from the orchestral hush of the sea down below.
I want to say that we were altered
by our hidden inventories of longing,
when, simply, there was an unfamiliar bed
covered in a blue comforter, three down pillows,
and a damp stain when we rose up.
We knew it was trespass,
and yet there was a tenderness in your hands
at the washbasin, a little slip of soap
pressed against the coverlet, wetted and foaming,
like a spirit going over and over the world
of what it already knows.
Perhaps there are blessings
that blossom outward from violation.
Perhaps we had to enter through a new door
to rise differently, glad to have fallen
from the wings we meant to put back on,
from the myths we needed to walk through
into the incandescence of our ordinary lives.
In Praise of What Remains
After he left you on the wrong side of beautiful,
your body thrown like a coat onto the ground,