Aubade

My ghosts line up, mouths full of bitter 

greens and sweet grasses, 

names chalked on the walls                                     

of ruined buildings, the night

smelling of their breath. 

One wears a split lip, 

saxophone-blown. Sometimes he calls                 

in sick. I am not your splendid harness.

Don’t wait up. What is sleep anyway. 

Barnyard animals, goats and owls sleep. 

Even the earth with its seeds and vegetables 

rooting underground can rest. 

The joists of the house squeak. 

Like stuttering bells, pipes gurgle 

all night. Frost sets a breakfast table.  

Butter and milk, clatter of copper.

Watering can from which I wish

to be poured. What can I do 

but honor the first silver 

hair in the winter comb.

My soul wears a crown of milk thistle and woolly-heads

Sometimes she is buried at sea,
wrapped in linen, the waves like mouths 
of glass. Sometimes she rises again.

Mollusk-pearled, she strolls the village 
dripping kelp. Called Pink Star, 
Himalayan, Celtic, Diamond of the Dead 

Sea, she does not answer to those names.  
No hymn, no pilgrimage, no wafer 
on the tongue. She eschews hallelujah. 

Refusenik of frankincense and myrrh.
Sometimes she claims she’s just off the boat, 
amnesiac. Takes the name Augusta Agnes.

Washes her unmentionables
at the sink. Bleaches her mustache.
Vagrant Sundays spent rolling in hay, tan,

sun-warm, indistinguishable from dry grass.
No bathing costume, swims in her drawers. 
Wades in cranberry bogs. Eats tomatoes off the vine.

Sleeps on the beach. Sand makes a dune of her body.
At church bazaars, she filches Chesterfields
and barters for lace mantillas. Disappears for days. 

Ignores my pleading letters penned in blackberry ink.
Neighbors say I should keep her on a leash.                    
She restoreth. She maketh still. She doth thirst.

Tiny words, real but illegible. 

The dog finds a small dead body and nuzzles it with her nose. 

Sometimes the petals of moon flowers tear as they open. 

A linguistic change is called a juncture loss. 

And here you’ll have to use your imagination because I’m not sure. 

Back then we grew mock orange in the yard. 

At first I didn’t think I would continue. 

Everything including the walls had been stripped bare. 

We say exact whereabouts when we really want to know. 

I was carrying it in a wagon and bringing it back home with me. 

I had visions of log runners driving logs down rivers. 

Gravity affects us and we age. 

I know I use too much honey in my tea. 

Trust is an arrangement. 

Who decides light?

Suppose, you say, it began with the chickens,
the way one wing raised 
could unbalance,
the way they learned
to tilt their heads 
in a concession to gravity, all at once.

Yes! I like it, I say.
The pleasure of synchronicity.
The pigs, being dominant
in cognition, would be next.
They might listen to the rain
and learn rhythm
from the downspout.

Music, it seemed to you,
would be a matter of curled tail
and the scent of hay.
The cows would sing, without 
meaning to. 

I am entranced now: And the dark star
on the forehead of a pregnant heifer
would pulse, and she would moan
the river into the valley. 

You think this lovely, but obtuse.
You say, All night long, the fireflies
make love to the mist,

and in the morning, 
I interrupt,
the fox carries the music away,
warm between her jaws.

I’m gonna love you like 
nobody’s loved you 
with the rain flickering 
against my parted window
and the sheets pooled 
around my hips was when 
I felt the first note 
at the bottom of my stomach
that suggested it wasn’t 
the bottom and there was more 
mystery to fall through
than I could imagine 
perhaps less the bottom 
of my stomach than 
the precipice of my stomach
and my first thought was 
to reach for your wrist.

It occurred to me after
the party that things like 
walking out of a party 
with someone you just met 
holding hands along a moonlight 
river was an inaccessible romance 
vignetted by searchlights 
chased by people 
I didn’t understand
with no hope of 
participating in desire
until Billie Holiday 
sang that note.

Everything I have is yours
you’re a part of me
what is it about her 
voice that cleaves 
the octave like an ocean?
my destiny so ardently split?
I think I understand
how you “love 
music” without interrogation
as to genre or poetics
or school of thought
just the experience 
of living from note to note
each breath lasting only as long 
as it sustains the next.

Something so heavy with meaning
all we can do     is drag 

our hands across the surface
itching to define to fix
as a compass point
                              navigating what 

I thought I understood
because I lived within its skin
and yet
                              stroking the trunk
                              fingering a fold 

I understand nothing
not even the shape
                              let alone the name 

even the tracks it leaves in its wake
keep changing
                              and look 

in each depression
the falling rain
                              becomes sea

SLEEPING WITH JANE

Again I mutate as we move through
the old park, ready to launch 
past the spectral-fired flowers, 
past the Japanese elm sighing
alongside the swarm of Jizo statues,
bald little monks tall as wine bottles,
each transmitting a silent symphony 
of grief—Jizo, protector of unborn babies. 
Jizo, an army of stone guardians 
stalwart in cardinal colored caps
and bibs—I rise above the remains

of my never known, not a phoenix,
but a woman without memory, not
a man on his endless knee to the night,
but a woman with a woman living in one
minute you undressed me and led me 
into the pond and despite the angst of algae
between my toes I knew I was safe, like 
a child who lives no longer, a child smuggled 
into the afterlife in the sleeves of Jizo’s robe.

JANE COMPLAINS

about losing wall space to Zina and Heike,
she wants a new glory hole, maybe something on Post Street—

when she’s angry her voice is clanging
bangles over a thin arm, so I hear new glory hole instead 
of new gallery and wonder if it’s mine or hers 
that’s suddenly inadequate

but before the wrinkled page of the sky 
swells with emptiness,
I decide to let her know:

things can always go differently

Emma Bee Bernstein committed suicide 
inside the Peggy Guggenheim Collection on the Grand Canal.
She was 23. 

Where did she do it?
In front of Léger’s Men in the City
(purchased by Peggy the day Hitler invaded Normandy),
or next to Brancusi’s Bird in Space
(acquired as the Germans approached Paris),
or in the garden? Was Emma Bee
standing on the gravesite of Peggy’s 14 beloved Lhasa Apsos?

And how? 
                         I can’t find this information anywhere.

Jane asks: what does this have to do with anything?

everything (the last dog died in 1979) 

and nothing (her name was Cellida)

Killer whales have stopped reproducing. 
Polar bears are eating their cubs. 

Koalas abandon their young. Breathless,
nose low to the brush to keep

from choking on rising smoke,
they run towards the thousands,

pounds of food we airdropped
where earth stopped burning or

flames just hadn’t reached yet,
guilt for our part in this end

or fear it would come for us
the same. We tell ourselves

everything just wants to survive.

Believe in life as circle, not line.
In Karma, if it means our endurance.

We spread stories about wombats
herding animals into their burrows,

kangaroos hugging their rescuers,
or foxes feeding baby bears

uncharred, canidae milk. But animals
know to rely on no one. Their own

scathed hides and carcasses pile
the roadsides along bus routes

to the local preschool. The children
we chose to have must fight

gagging at the smell. My infant 
daughter screams at us 

for plunging the bulb syringe
deep into her nostril. 

She exhales snot mixed 
with my milk, screams

again, then sleeps. 
She doesn’t know

we’ve made this quiet 
possible. She turns her head away 

where breathing comes easiest 
and reaches for a warm body 

as soon as she can smell it close.
She doesn’t know the coral reefs

are dead and sargassum reeks
in mounds along Caribbean coastline,

starfish suffocated under its spreading. 
And maybe this is why

we’ve made her. Because 
she doesn’t know survival

is in our hands, forgives us 
their indiscretions, and lets us 

hold her body as though 
it were a world 

we could still save.   

inverse twin, lost sister

I.

              Like our dead, you live in memory:

our grandmother’s clouded eyes 
              saw you instead of me. In the cold, 
                            my bones still ache along your long-healed 

                                          fractures. I’ve spent years distancing myself
                            from you, but here, in our grandparents’ home, 
              I want to pull you close. When the spring 

snows melted, I left my apartment in the city, 
              headed north through twisting back roads
                            over mountains, stopped to pee, squatting

                                          behind bushes, until finally I arrived here, 
                            on this Maine island. The cottage still 
              overlooks the rocky coast. Every dawn, 

I paddle through the wind-whipped waves
              of the Thread of Life ledges, those jagged 
                            rocks the seals love. I find wonder 

                                          even in the swirls of floating plastic: 
                            deflated balloons, grocery bags, forlorn 
              shoes. Do you remember the summers 

we spent here? The swimming lessons 
              in the frigid water, the sea stars 
                            in the tidal pools? 

                                          My grief for our grandparents 
                            has grown without you. Also,  
              all the sea stars have disappeared. 

II.

              Where do we converge,

                                          overlay each other

                            like a poorly developed film,

                            our two images a blur of light and form?

                                          Where and when

                                                        do we divide? 

III.

Every Sunday I pierce my thigh 
              with the silver fish of a needle. 

                            Is this what separates me 
                                          from you? 

              I inject testosterone synthesized in a laboratory, 
                            made from soybean and yams. 

                            Like magic, it’s difficult to believe 
                                          this exhilaration of hair 

                                          on my face and chest 
                                          comes from plants. 

                            When I thief myself out,
              I am halted by mirrors: this beard

                                          that grows miraculous 
                                                        and strange. 

Persephone, am I the pomegranate and you the seed?  

I have no answers. 
I possess a tongue, maps,
night. Am I an arrow

from hell? An impossible
bending spoon? Estranged
in this new knowledge 

of the earth and the starless 
rivers that run beneath, 
I can no longer return

to how I was before.
You swear that without me,
winter. But did I choose to hide

the sun from the sky? 
Frozen, the ground cracks
with questions. I am still

tossing, pulled between two 
worlds. It’s hard to believe 
this same sun still rises even

after we were ripped apart.

I am thankful for the acres in the inches
a poem makes on the page of its saying.
Like in this one, there is a large meadow
with a long table in the middle of it,
and seated at the table, every friend
and ancestor I could ever invoke
turns their faces to me and mouths the words
of a pop song from thirty years ago.

I am thankful that this image does not
unmake itself in a cloyed nostalgia.
Instead, I turn to you, my dear reader,
and say apple and flannel and snow
falling on the trees cut down to produce
parchment and draft and fraudulent treaty.

beautiful things lived here.
That small boned bird that glowed in the understory.
That big wide mushroom that was underneath us that whole time.
That elm the autumn of the drought when the leaves fell before they changed.
I stood under a field of green on a field of green on a field of green.
I understood then. There is no need to hurry death forward.

COSMOLOGY 

Cold hands—warm torso—
time like an orange—

time like a bag of salt 
gray oxen drag—

How many years of salt? 
Then, one day, a shell. 

And fire, where joints should be.
A field of rose, a town 

of anthracite, river of milk— 
a face that hisses, sizzles—

girls who sort potatoes in the dark—
I orient myself by smell. 

Memory blooms in the stone like a rose. 
Its fiberglass insulation burns.

ZAVOD DIAFOTO

The face of history is sweating.

Her cheeks stretch
under a white kerchief.

 Hills of wheat hum 
dark against the horizon.

Women work the sugar beet 
into crisp monochrome. 

Women sit like sand (uncolorized).

Swamp fields of hemp.
Salt hills on the shore.

Men merge with their standing—
more pitchfork and spit.

They photograph her body—
no record for the state
of her arm, the corn,
our rippling hand.

I interpret dutifully: Academic 
in the field, squints at heat. 

The cleft in his chin speaks
to the clefts in the wheat—
a well-worn association.