Eliaosome
do not think I don’t know the important
element of any fabric
landscape/ wild ginger on the precipice the down
slope the true side soft
pubescent & tender shush shush
//
I stuck wildflowers
in a Mason jar on the porch table/ Indian
Paintbrush/ Butterfly Weed & Russian Sage/ natives
grown from mixed seeds/ incorporate the world
over & what makes an ecological
advantage & what makes
the world dressed up & set schismatically in the real
or abstract straight or crooked in this
tension/ discord boxed up & tied tight with right
-colored ribbon shush & here I am
an enterprise flawed & wounded in amalgamates
of shame & hubris/ ambition & my own private
hungers/ something creamed off as in
scoop the topmost richest layer as in
smash the glass door to get inside shush shush
//
At the head table for now I keep my own strung &
stitched in goldwork in fever/ elegy/ that sickness
of melancholy & longing long
long roadless & fearless underneath
hush
//
& closest
to the soil three-lobed & hollow
-found by emergent flies is the false lure of an animal
succumbed to winter as the fake thawing
carcass & the teeny-tiny oily food
gift attached/ collected by ground ants
returning to burrow – eaten – in the ebb &
freed from my own my own
beautiful winged eliaosome
palpable/ as pain to the insistence
of consciousness/ as a seed cast off
to germinate belongs
to the fragile infinite
Strange Seasons
Hortus deliciarum, an illuminated text compiled between 1176 and 1185 in Alsace, France by a nun called Herrad of Landsberg, served as a pedagogical tool containing theological, literary, horticultural, musical and philosophical material. The book has fascinated scholars because it celebrates a little-known monastic community of women who were writers, scribes, musicians and artists.
Praise the matrons the mothers the daughters the wives
& sisters who wear every lash as
kindness as solicitude/ here here in this garden of delights praise
the dames of dolor/ women pleasure-bred for bleeding in
exuberance suborned smelling of sweet pine
& eucalyptus smelling of sweat trapped
rising from the heat of a secondhand coat from the sink
the stink of my own unwashed body squatted
in the gush & issue of a sky of a sky of a sky stung
in stippled cirrocumulus strata emaciated as the pattern
on a mackerel’s back as an omen a sign as a gypsy moth
as a Cossack trader as a Hanseatic merchant write me
in code in Graphina anguina in lichen calligraphy in nuts
& berries & tokens in gardenias’ tongues &
rotting fascia in funereal gladioli in substrate of stone & salt
my chest celled & silver lined I’m your receptor so let me talk talk
talk write me in
transmissions talk me in deceptions as infectious & epidemic
as the Eichstätt yellow viola as a diseased wallflower in snug in refuge
of imperfection (I’ll take honest straightforward sin
any day) as parishioner to priest wife to husband by way of
by way of polyphony compiled in the Hortus deliciarum write me
in brittle women write me sleepless the quiet hollered up &
fed upon rampant oceans inroads billeted in gridless magpies’
eyes in mandevilla’s gorgeous overtaking uncontrolled/ un
refined in praise of in praise of strings & glitter
things sprinkling our midnight both the blue of distant mountains how
familiar & sad stricken/ admitted/ in closeness the callouses the feral
torch of a much too warm winter a far too early
summer/ strange seasons & that freak storm that sent
my flower garden sideways/ the peonies/ laid them down & tore the red
rock trumpet’s blossoms from woody vines & drove coyotes
out from snowed wood as shapeshifters as latter-day coureurs
de bois/ cut through the bearing/ waiting/ yearning for light’s
return as though the drift/ the darkness might
be avoided one cross closer to morning
Rope
–after W. B. Yeats’ Leda and the Swan
before the swan shape-shifted before a whitecap
crossing/ gilded in the swell a punch a curl
before I knew I was that woman
pull me up gentle bird not hard
off this granite bottom lake
before the swan simpered
& coaxed & tempted/ provoked/ I was that girl
transport me single on ion-tatted wings
I was the boy-friended bevy in the boat all wash
& syncopation sparked & gliding/ crisscrossing
the silvery slip unseparated
as the flocking almost autumn’s honking
wedge fistful of late-summer shimmer I was
champion of skim & skid connected/ my knees above
my skis my parted thighs caressed by the breeze
because I was the woman the poet’s pet
pull me up gentle to be both & neither
nor never the savor nor the swan
before I was the poet’s woman
I was aerialist aqueous & birdlike hanging
on a string a wire a strand a lanyard stretched
crossing/ a lofty cosmonaut sprinkling the dark of a slab-
girded inland sea or scorched by day & day &
night twined bird in & out tender & stony
culled enticed caught
rushed in at the wake hit hard inside
& outside the edge’s weight
that’s the trick birdie-bye
broadside before the swan I was voltage holding
on until the dash I was electric charge
in the spill I savored the salty stew as the flavor
not the drop from the tip I was high-wire nerve & vaulting
before puerile & passionate I was
I know I thought I knew
enough to let go of the rope