Books of advice, magazines, secret cures,
formulae, strident pages
stiff-legged and shouting expert
in the public square of the indomitable truth,
snapshots of the honeymoon,
paradise in silhouettes, champagne,
a silver script: it all flares up
so eagerly to flame,
takes the match like a lover’s hand
hungry to dissolve.
How urgent to abandon others to their lives
so you can sit in this,
the only room
where both your hearts are beating –
your only hearts and only yours,
the man across the room,
the only man who sees your heart
as the composer saw the birds perched across the alley on the wires.
They were not notes and staff until he played them as they stood
and they blazed into song because he made them so.
Listen.
Is the tune he plays the song you want to be?
No answer is good enough,
as long as it is yours.
I like walking the house at night,
my husband asleep
beside my absent shape.
I would use the word secret,
but it makes him restless,
as though he were a child and I
used the word tomorrow;
as though he were dying
and I used the word
tomorrow. I walk the house
I built before we married,
water plants I’ve tended longer
than our bed. The weeping fig
and I sift confidence.
I vow to write for morning,
for tomorrow, for the man
who will wake and rise,
walking the house alone
with coffee and windows
full of light, surveying trees
and telling birds his own eternal
mysteries, of which I am not
jealous.
Practice saying you’re beautiful.
You must say this
out loud – you must say this
one thousand times
until your face believes you.
You must say this and see
the glorious and wounded
contours of the human frame,
your broken nose and hooded eyes,
creased skin, your crooked teeth,
you must say this
until your face contains
the tired man beside the road,
the woman in the field,
the boy in the cardboard box,
the girl beneath the hanging tree,
the mother’s calloused hands,
the father’s folded breasts,
the milky stare of old woman, man,
all begging to believe
that no one is invisible, you must say this
until it becomes a chant, a cry, a call, a cheer, a song,
until the willed imagination turns
to face the other faces in the crowd of self
and in that gaze that nods and smiles, the camera
– in the image of us all –
destroys and remakes the world.
Nine chickadees hunch
in the packed snow of a tire track
picking spilled seed.
They look so suddenly
earthbound, as if they are what scatters
from the sack, blind
in January sun, sharp
scribbled feet stuck
in the drift,
so many careless darts –
I laugh and laugh.
Love comes to this:
forgetting our wings, we bob about
for scraps until we startle
and recall the sky.
I step near.
The little band explodes
and the last dark ruffle streaks
his line uneven, low across the plowed-up bank,
wild pitch
from strong, unpracticed arms.
Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs,
slipping her hands beneath the white feathers,
biddies murmuring in prayer.
The warm globes felt like hers, the same way
the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck
did not surprise her, the same way
the knife had missed her toe –
of course it had – when her brother threw it.
Inside, the blade stood sentry
in the floorboard, witness
to all that she refused to lose.
She knew what she deserved:
salvation, not for good works, but purely
for faith that the world was lovely,
that it held things like starfish she had never seen,
but would, one day, so far from this Missouri dirt
that she would feel she’d lost a limb, remembering
that what we need grows back, casual as scattered seed.
