April Storm
Under the gutter, sheaves of boxwood bend like dictionary pages, long words
washed away.
This happens every year: fear, and flooding, and the wait for wet mulch to clear
a path, back steps to cedars.
I was a fool to buy this house, thinking of shade and stretch of roof, not the water
at its roots
rushed there like blame, swirling eddies from high ground to the lowly, from
castle to moat.
I was the kind of fool a woman strives to become, answered by the modest
promise of surface,
inexperienced. What if wet ivy wreathes my neck? What if the berry bramble
stops me cold?
I stand still because I must and shudder because I must. I always pretend to take
my time, watching and walking.
I read my image upside down in steamy windows, and my flat heels mark the
clay.
I’m not going anywhere. I clock the sun scorching clouds like sheets where the
flat iron falls.
I’ll wade to the shed at the chain link fence and stand on tiptoe to reach the
shovel. Then I’ll dig, no one to ask
the angle for the blade, or where I think I’m pointing that wheelbarrow full of
blasted twigs.
Eavesdropping
Say you don’t like the way you walk.
Or your hands braced at odd angles on the pillow
beside your cheeks each cold morning.
Sparing you from the kids next door
the cathedral points line up
atop the chain link fence, praying nigh to bleeding,
the configuration of divine symbol
and the jet thrust of rising to it,
looking to rest there in perfect denial,
though it’s only a wall.
Say you waited all day for the magnolia
shadow binding the street’s sore belly
and it showed up late.
You might take that as reason enough
to imbue the entire slowly aggrandizing past
with the humor of peeling bark
and the sure knowledge of friends getting
the joke. But it would be more correct not to.
You don’t have to like those hands.
You don’t have to think about walking
that walk, each shoesole pressing
the roof of heaven or the fast steel floorboards
of purgatory. If you were a fly,
it wouldn’t make much difference.
God, I love every atheistic inch of your gestures.
But you can’t see me from here.
Diurnal
The whole day. Round as a starved trashbasket.
Dawn’s streaks, smoke, air the element
Of birth and speech: it doesn’t last.
Sky-writing’s dashed out, and on the fencepost
Not the head of your enemy but the morning
Paper, dew-damp stories inked to epic.
The car door swings open to accompaniment
Of beeps and twangy slings, dashboard diagrams
Outlining the obvious. Your boots tattoo grids in dust.
Pry the gate. Track its arc across the driveway.
Furled grass, gravel, round bales looming like parents
Above wrongdoing, staying their hands out of love.
Here comes life on its own legs, the horses hungry
And confident, their long heads technical.
The dun gelding urinates into spotless dirt.
You throw him hay and he nudges into its nest.
The whole day on fire, dry acres down the section,
Later a truck pretending to hurry,
Water’s more costly than air because your tongue’s
Shriveled paper and nobody’s there to talk to, the whole day
Which, spelled across sky, might warn meetings.
Reach your hands to take up the matter of care,
The clean food of farm animals. It’s all: all around you.
You breathe it, carry it, wear it, swear at it, veil it.
Geese slip their vee like dancers
Whose wrapped feet are clouds, and the armadillo
That dug your neighbor’s lawn lies split in the gutter.
The hunters sleep late, yearning for the season of license.
The beetles stir in pinebark when the sun warms it,
And you tend to everything, the whole day,
Where the sun answers your stoical questions
You want so badly to speak aloud, and heads to its rest,
Tangled in the done, the undone, pasterns of mares, tails
Of rabbits, desiccation of dying, the natural angle
Open and closed, the whole day: the whole,
Geometrical, reliable, unfinished day.
