No Garden
In straw, a fire-web of light,
drawn sinews of halt and stretch,
and I bury my wrists, move my
eyes in dry scratches
of toughened fiber smiles.
The dead hover in the hallows,
owls statuesque in hazy attention.
You are the child lit at dawn, sighing,
engulfed steadfast in your raised eyebrow
full of milk and heavy grains. Waters
dwindle outside, the stalks of red-tipped
grasses struggle, the wind sleeps.
I am turned to the sun and made
to soften clay with persistence, but
there is too much spit in my voice.
Like the corrugated pauses of crickets,
there are codes in this aged soil.
* * *
Kilauea Caldera
Fires do not wait for us,
or their smoke and gassy fingers
reaching down every mouth
to touch the cough once, just once—
a gift from Pele, the spewing dance
carrying along gulps of air.
No time in arms, your
connective mind and my hot
teeth—warmed by spices
of coral, tungsten, meringue.
This present crevasse is too porous
for my own laughter: an epicenter
that measures the day, the
correspondence between solid sulfur
and liquid rock consumed with
grace and dead whispers.
* * *
After the Underwhelming
We understood the patterns of work,
in the way bent sunlight lined concrete
with striated shadows, dead crickets. Winds
like claws dug at everything, the Colorado
fossil dust sharp, eye-seeking—rain dotted
eyebrows, curled leaves, fissile scents
unlike rain. We knew how our parents
lifted the day and settled before bedtime,
blew in and around us, spinning us along.
But in the drum of traffic outside, the
particular reach of the cottonwoods,
something stagnated and lost rhythm, carried
nothing but syncopated bursts and silences—
the loss of response even at the sight of milk,
bricked cheese. We held our eyes level and picked
up our feet: goslings in fear of fear, unaware.
As the snows came and ice pointed, always,
down at us, we hurried through the curtain
of dripping water, unavoidable as it was.