ARS POETICA 

between sky & earth         the mouth
perches             its heavy want

its slick parables                so far from 
the fingers        actual agents of ardor

i mistype poem as             pome
from the french                 pomme de terre

apple of earth  the earth
in the mouth    my tongue

clutching          the word                sky 
as a shovel turns             over dirt

as the sound of dirt        hitting 
a casket              the grief 

of speaking        what must be 
made known      &           never 
understood        how else 

do we    get closer
with what fingers            fail 

to grasp              time’s   dissolution
childhood’s petrichor    her ochre 
hair       o             are you 

the apple’s skin                               or the reflection 
in the skin           let me address   you 

fully     as i should have                 from the start
as i know you                  void-throat

skull-capped-window   cerulean-plowed-
field-of-nothing             cathedral-of-pale-ants

tell me  is it true

waking in you     is like walking 
in an orchard      where all prior 

is heard              but only from
a far      opaque distance

a radio’s              underwater          garble 

tell me    am i     doing this right

                   after Lisa Russ Spaar 

NOCTURNE w/ LILACS & RAIN

Before rain, we steal lilac cones from rich peoples’ gardens 
one at a time until they make a bouquet. We go to bed 

with feet the color of crushed blackberries, small stars 
of broken glass kissing our soles & dream. As we dream, 

it rains. Rain trickling off lilac cones like your tongue 
lying limp & fat with sleep. Your tongue snug 

in your mouth, next to me, & mine in my mouth. 
Does a lilac like to smell itself? Is that its version of dreaming? 

An unlit cop car slinks down the street, scuttling racoons 
from their feast. A racoon in rain can smell like lilac, will sleep wet 

curled among its sisters like a tongue among its teeth, 
like bills in a mailbox. If our roof caves in 

it will be because we sent the bills back 
with a recording of rain inside, as if to say, 

here, listen while you sleep. Hear the rain 
touching the ungodly world as if this was its sole purpose. 

A tremulous tongue, inventing desire.

LIKE THE SHADOW OF A WING

I too have stared at the stars & found it hard 
to believe them indifferent. Who are we 
to say we are new? & isn’t it like this: 

not what’s discovered but what’s been known 
& forgotten, despite ourselves. Despite saying 
“I want to remember this.” The cold leeching 

up my leg, my father’s black shape 
moving away through the snow, farther 
from our fire ring, across the latticework 
of trees. Our necks craned in wonder at the sky. 
Was it this, then, the first prayer? But already 

he moves further & further away from me 
& I have forgotten how to move. Where, 
a moment ago he traced them, constellations 
fall apart like wet paper. Like the body 

of the rabbit we saw yesterday slip 
                            from an osprey’s talons                   & tumble to earth 
                                                        with a gymnast’s grace. & isn’t it like this? 

                            The soul falls     catches on itself             keeps falling. 
                                         How when the darkness comes it passes over you 
                                         like the shadow of a wing.            Soft as the inner thigh 
                                                                                      of a rabbit.
                                                                                                               Almost sweet. 

                                                                                      Already 
we’re retracing our footprints through the snow. 
Already the light has moved on. Already 
we’ve arrived back at the fire, already 
I’m forgetting everything. 

Like any other reasonable children who want to play 
with their small goat but don’t know how to explain
their games because they don’t know enough goat words, 
my brother and I strap on skateboard helmets
and take turns headbutting with Roger. 
What else did she expect us to do?
I’m not saying my mom’s the devil when she’s angry, 
but I’ve seen a goat: I gallop towards Roger with unfamiliar legs,
losing human form with each strike. I know horns
when I see them. No one will recognize me.
I’ll look nothing like my mom.

At the entrance to the museum was a model town
made to depict how the city had once been.
In the model there were no people but lights
illuminated all angles. The butcher shop, 
the grocer, the pomegranate stand.
Rugs the color of dried plums 
and large bellied pots lined the walls. 
With his thick fingers the director pointed to a map,
this is where they entered, this is where we fended them off. 
Each morning, we woke to pigs squealing, walked 
the wet October streets. Climbed the abandoned mosque.
We clicked pictures, through fog, of a broken minaret. 
In the church, we lit candles for those newly 
and long dead. At night we drank with soldiers 
and learned the word for dark, for bat. 
We already knew the word for war.

The bed was thus, the curtains were therefore.
The moon floated past the window frame 
and appeared to be. Fans roared as softly as. 
A blue light becoming, or a wind 
unlike anything outside.
Or a memory of, but less than. 
In other words, a fine dust settling on the dust ruffle. 
Released from memory. Released into remembering.
Motor coach and reservoir, children and fools.  
The pasture being itself. Midnight. Perfume. 
Schopenhauer breathing into a paper bag.
Sequins, rutabaga, emerald hills.  
Burj Khalifa and a feeling 
that in a moment anything could. 
That the clouds might.  
4:00 p.m. Al Ain: what to say? 
Or your voice, the risk of. And rebar.
Then traffic, rushing as if it could stop. 
Sure it could. 
The noise, the ticking. Noise,
noise, boom. You letting go
was unlike. You leaving
was nearly like.  

The man dreams under the tree. Or is he dead. 

My students can never agree. How sealed is 

that scene. Peaceful but sealed and the birds 

are cut out. Their outlines remain but they 

have fled. How to be free. That is what 

the man dreams, folded arms, ankles crossed.

When I was a nanny, the girl and my hands 

smelled of the soap the family used. They 

always fed me and when I used that soap 

years later, her tiny cheeks returned to me, 

rising skyward on the swing. In the Chagall, 

the sky is smudged with blue and the poet 

seems to gaze upward, but his eyes are wells

of black that look inward at loss. If you don’t have 

someone in a time like that you don’t have family. 

Then you covered me in clean sheets. We watched 

La Strada together before we never talked again. 

You hummed along when the fool played his violin, 

and once in the dark you put your hand on my side 

to say, That’s old. It isn’t here now. There were no violins 

in my childhood school. My mom rented a trumpet 

for my brother and when it went unpaid someone 

knocked on the door and took it away. Everything 

has a purpose, says the fool, even this pebble. 

I never cried when I left home. But, my friend, 

for three years I cried if I said your name.

I was born among
speech-prone animals,

blind to all but the sliver
above. I see the hawks

often there—inseparable,
a pair, red-shouldered. Omen

of tall woods and water.
The first hawk oak-alighted

to hunt the bridle path,
the second circling, her kee-aah

letting the other birds
—at the rim of perception—

know of my unknowing?

outside the dementia ward 

a woman tumbled fresh-hatched 
from the egg of herself is watching
small children plant geraniums 
in the garden’s empty places, knees 
in the dirt, steered by a lay sister who if not 
                                         a nun is still a woman 
jesus charged down from his cloud palace 
to kiss directly on the mouth. 
red is a color with many symbolic 
uses, not least of which the tongues 
we cage behind our teeth,
not least of which the velvet 
petals in their nodding clusters, 
hot-sauce hot-rod blood-hot pucker-up, 
extravagance in the wormful wet. 
inside are rooms with doors 
that do not lock and men 
who clutch their pillows like 
infants they bless and bless again, 
so much weight crushed 
against their ribs it’s spilling out
in words like yes and no and stop it
                                         i want you to stop it. 
new flowers coaxed from their cases. 
sun sliding between shrouds 
of gray. like penitents or mourners 
we work to the labors which humble 
us most, attended and searching, 
turning the earth with our spades, 
letting in the light. 

legacy

i walked out to the water. there was the tree 
with its round brown trunk and crown full
of leaves and ghosts and smoking embers,
and all around were more trees and small
green shrubs and large boulders wherever
was appropriate to place a boulder. the sky
folded down upon my head in one gray veil
that i took in my hands and tied beneath
my chin so that i became my grandmother,
and as my grandmother i caught white birds
in my skirt and ordered the blue mountains
to sit up straight and say hello to the world. 
at the water i bent at the waist to count 
reflections: stalks of grass and weed, un-
named hosts of pale shapes moving, my home 
on the rock, new-built and then ruined, food 
for men who move stones. myself, young-
old-young, rippled and smoothed by wind.

Time is a heady gardenia, white scent 
pulling me into the green underswell
in which I am young and still unstacking 
the matryoshka doll of his mind. 
A desire path, the internet says, 
is a consequence of unruliness, 
through foliage an unplanned line not set
by formal design. They expedite 
our wanting of home, of fields with their herds 
of bells, of fish the patient fisherman 
silvers the end of his hook with. Cow path, 
pig trail, goat track, game trail, path that compulsion 
leads us to suffer, the uncharted road 
between us like orchards the dead light up.

The coals throw off their last heat.
The night is thick, low
to the ground. If I am to survive,
I must breathe from the space 
between rotting leaves 
and daffodils’ first green shoots.

Somewhere in Northern Ohio, on a farm
my mother is drunk, kissing an open
cut, placing my hands to my sides. 

She is covered in moths. She keeps saying

I am your mother                I am your mother

               The moon is blood;

Wears her clothing inside out. 
Points to the invisible bison— says 
they come for me; my heart
is facing their curled horn.

She screams to the yearling: 

I hate her                    I hate her

                 I hate her!

                                     My mother hates me.

                 The first girl I kissed, the boy 
                 I bought an apartment for, the last
                 girl I kissed, my roommates, my cat, 
                 the grocery store clerk, the botanical
                 gardens, the bee colonies and their honey 
                 all hate me.

I hush her. 

My mother is tired,

                 My mother is my mother.

I am a good daughter. I take 

care of love for the both of us. 

                                  ***

In between the laundry line she flashes
smiles as the tablecloths roll with flame. 
The air, thick, like leather.
Mother is on fire, again.

You must understand, 
I cannot find peace. 

I try to stop her, but I am no good.
I open her mouth with paper gloves
and out comes the red heat.
Listen.
Listen to my heart beat.

The moon is blood. I wake up 
in Northern Ohio with 
a mother who is a mother who is my mother 
who digs a hole in the earth for a dead bird
she finds on the side of the road.

I say, mother, 
the bird does not need a grave.

Everything needs a grave she says. 

Even me. Even you.

I Love What My Eyes Have Laid Sight On
              
                  after Angela Bassett

You: a gust
              of fresh winter                             air /                          a fountain of eternal / life
an overflowing                            garden of lavender                             that never fails / to bloom

You: survival / reincarnated                                a wellspring / who communes               nightly / 
with chameleons                             for nourishment                                        who built shelter with clay
                            and a dull / knife                        who carved / family
                                                                                             from a block of ruined / ice

You: a poet / again                                               who found the words
                                          they needed / on the underside                             of Hathor’s throne
                            preening between two pillars                     of purple clouds

You see / god                                                         in the looking glass                             you stare into
                                          the [cis] eyes /                                              of the world  
                        with the moon                                                      in your back / pocket
                                                                      you a column / of light

orange glowing                                                          full / of topaz maps                             blessed by stars

reverse supper.

Your brother turns off the cartoon for your nieces
and removes the collard greens from his plate. The warm palm

on your thigh, your wife’s immediate shield, returns to the table. 
One uncle laughs about the rising cost of synthetic oil changes. Your

rose-colored aunt does not. Panic unnestles itself from your bruised 
heart, hidden beneath the dark brown binder. Your family diverts their eyes 

from the man in your face and turns attentively to the head of the table.
Your mother, dressed in her warmest pajamas, extinguishes the fire

in the corners of her eyes and places the matches back into her mouth.
You unwrap yourself from each hug, every grandparent and cousin,

even the ones you haven’t seen since you first learned to write. The air 
returns to a crisp blue. You and your wife get back into the car 

and drive with the sun stretched across the dashboard. You return
to the couch, damp head in her lap. Your phone begins to ring.

Almost Every Book of Poetry Has a Poem about Horses