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.
for Janet Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again and you are free to tear through reedy fields shouting now, now, now at diving chickadees as if you were a dog awakened after death passed by, and now, all paws akimbo, means this time a sacred work, a wishing well, a friend…
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…
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,…
for Claudia at 5 hours old There were two kinds of mornings the day you were born. We had the other. We whispered about you in bedrooms and then we talked in kitchens. We did laundry, folded sheets thinking about your hands, how they would be so small. We paired sock with sock and then…
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…
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…
