some grow in shadow under snow
shaking off ice incidentally as
it forms to suffocate
any warmth—born into
the bones of their ancestors know,
to shiver in the cold. how
cracks in the dirt divide a world
where rains have run off steep slopes,
the way roots cannot reach another
through hardened places
just the long edge between us
like is the friend who came back to me
already gone and saying, goodbye
too late, evidence of something coming
i could not stop, the same
his mother said it was my fault
because i was his best friend and
my mom told me i did not love her
these small deaths—
i now have a petal that will not
open. from below snow, how
like my mother and her father
like my mother’s mother
who wrote secret books between
making lunch and shelling peas for dinner
pushing the binding to
undo later by another—i felt it
in the cool wind of giants some
neither too warm nor too unkind
driving to work, walking to school
laying upon the ground in a
puffy jacket beside me
and i am bare, until un-gripping
the hands that had to let me go,
the warmth of others burned
like a question buried.
***
a person cannot hold a
defining edge to trace the line
without falling far
being almost one and the same
on thin margins—born
flat-footed and dreamy if
like myself—and maybe
how i decided to just fall
on one side and then the other
sometimes almost too far, and
would stitch each part i found that fit
the best and the worst of things
within my knowledge like
peter pan with his shadow—
that kept trying to run.
maybe like this a person
can escape the bindings that
limit, or was it in seeing
the true face of my mother
a little broken but still beautiful
without the anger,
who tried to give me anything
but what she had been given
who removed her own leaves
to be free of memory—
and could not get enough of
the sun anymore,
until she was only a stem
unable to hold, and
would smile, a
little aggressively
even as she fell. she
did make my heart, too
same as my father taught me
the depth of warmth, and
the necessity of careful thinking
and i took this warmth
like a blanket for any i
might run into being half
a snowy flower, or would
curl up in my own mouth—
too sad to be still
and push
as i wanted for her, the way
she taught me to do
like i wished for my grandmother
and maybe even my grandfather
they called a monster.
***
i define now, on what some
might say is too soft an edge
of what is the truth and what
is a story we tell to make
the truth pretty like/
a flower, too small to be picked
placed in the vase forgotten
next to sunday’s paper
too unusual to be left alone
by those who would wear them
in their hair for a day or two
and what an adventure, how
through hard or powder snow
they keep pushing,
learning what is warm in
how hard they must shake
and the way light looks
a little dark beneath the layers,
and then suddenly, the sun.
In Due Proportion 