Category: Poetry

Riding a manta ray
through mangroves, small
hands small feet like
a squirrel suddenly grounded

is ready/ I have

curls from my grandmother
that cannot be kept when I am
hot and salty between waves-

a girl I remember from before
taken by a fish of peculiar shape
(I lived by the sea then) and how

I fled and how I bent hand-over-hand
around every curve by habit, there*

(My father told me,
philosophy and religion
can be the same in men):

it is in my roots to see a hole and place
mouth over space and hold until
it is filled; a starving a needing

an ancestral grieving in my heart
where if there is a falling there is a

turn, and it starts in a dream
where I know (and you know), we
are all in our hearts our own heroes/

for those who cannot hold

this slippery beast, be made like jasmine
thumps upon the screen door mid-night
stating I am I am I am, and
*dream | hard.

The Halifax river burns sometimes, a brackish lagoon where dolphins pass through, I have thought they were angels when young. the bell

rings      to lift the bridge over
there/my grandfather bracketed by the red blinking lights and
crickets in his open palm but quieter. just a certain haunting in us in

my mother’s crossed legs and crossed arms when she does not see i watch. I feel the rope, I

feel the ropes of a hammock and will just stay there,
and they are real and hurt a little. watch grasshoppers and think of chasing them though the grass itches, think of chasing grasshoppers earlier that day through the itchy grass to feel their little feet tap on my palm like a song. to feel a happiness/

I think of geppeto, because that’s just the way of it. I think of arms and legs on strings though I am running. at night

the sound of the bell, my mother’s gray eyes as the waters still at night. the stars are all blind but shrewd as an owl who lives in the elm with his sad questions, I see

her tender heart she has delicately fed, like a rose we once knew, who a prince loved like no other who a daughter tried to make well.  and,
like a glass dome upon the thorny spine I stay even now when she has gone.

We keep our mouths
gardens under glass
like a seed without rain
or a heart smooth and white
is without any pain

in silence-

I rather
my wild edges
rather hold fire, stand
where the world ends
in a sudden fall-
so your hand is
everything, and not
more of the same

distraction/ and you
speak to me of
a temple of
a place we can pray
to each other on
knees somewhere
warm where nothing

burns but the quiet
behind your eyes when sad
with me, but truth is

loud like you and I
like love is loud and

trying to hold all
men equally-
the gravity of it
is weightless
like ice beneath

will give way
and we fall hard/
and terribly:
I leave my socked foot
under the blankets and
say, to hell with all of it
except for you.

Not your hang-girl,
not in the sun, syrup
from plump figs/no,

the frozen place near
Saint Helens where I
breathed in the cold

burned and made the heart
drum/ with bracing rhythm
that holds a long winter.

There is always a certain
in a man’s face, the wrong
things my father said and

I was just pretty enough
he said, too. I know also

aligned to a certain danger,
the threat of beauty palpable,
my snow-blind, hardened ice;

the warmth of dreams
a river beneath, ends in
my mouth | flowers,

blue asters and jasmine like
new stars beyond the moon.

I prefer crush like heavy
to feel the world outweigh
things unneeded : the desire

of life without pain without
poems without the color
of indigo,

how someone might look this way:
shakes the pollen free>
but I need the weight

the way known
the heart blooms in
the shade of black

irises, muddy feet running
toward thunder.

A pressing cloud
time could open or lift

maybe a wind maybe a branch

in the path of a small bird,
her feet trembling,

to grasp just and dare hope
she will fly away and make useful,

a branch into a home.

Memory is my strength, the press
of air on a sea of golden leaves

and blaze of autumn a cane:
I will walk forever even when my feet

are broken birds like birds broken
beneath the lowest branches- to see

but not see they are gone, me
and others falling will keep falling

like a feather falls with no weight or rush but softly like wings rasp in the air.

Our hearts stay a cold resin, deep in the old oak, a wind nor a bird could lift

with song- but memory, a pressing cloud
barely touches and touches

every thing- and heralds every step.