centrepieces alternate roses and curly willow.
She goes to open houses to riffle through drawers,
to pocket tchotchkes and sniff the sheets.
She divines meaning from the way the chairs face
toward or away from the southern light.
She knows these people, as she knows the ones
on the Home & Garden channel:
sledgehammering through walls and revealing
their sodden, infested, but fixable souls.
She dyes her mane with Kool-Aid, and the pink runs.
She applies gold spray paint to her horn each morning,
hoping to imitate the brass tusks
on the unicorns skewered to the carousel,
their brittle, painted smiles, harnesses
embedded in their backs and shellacked to high gloss.
Her horn still has the unsettling texture of a tooth,
the suggestion of a living core, a warm and pulsing root.
Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman
I. Infancy as a human
I’ve seen this waist-high grass
and weeping tree before, in a drugstore frame
and a Bollywood movie, the trunk a pivot point
for coquettish hide-and-seek. On the cover
of Vanity Fair it had a swing,
just two ropes and a plank, a girl levitating
on the tip of her coccyx. Poofy virginal
white dress, elegant lipstick slash, Cubist chin,
she had it all. Someone proposed here,
votive candles in a heart, a flowered trellis;
it went viral on the internet and spawned
a thousand thousand proposals. Someone
has decided this is a place where no one
can be ugly, this lonely hillside that bears
but one tree, one strand of sweetgrass,
summer sun fixed at one low angle,
stuck like broken spotlight. The branches
ache to be free of their heavy greenery,
to winter for once. Shorn, fallen and bare.
II. A wedding
The gatekeeper for the mole people
peers at me over his pink nose, an intimate
bulb of mucus membrane, a mane of whiskers:
perceptive and multidirectional. I cite
my poor vision, hold my hands
in dirt-scoop formation, show off my nails,
grown long and hard and yellow
as curls of cold butter. A delicate
affectation, he says, but he steps aside.
The towers of their metropolis rise like
a dirt-castle sand castle, musty warm
from the inflamed earth. The black forest
of a black forest cake, spongy peat
that bounces back. They cannot look at each other.
Courtship is a blind forward groping.
The mole prince runs his translucent claws
down the useless heavy dimpled doughy
flesh of my backside, finds stubby legs
coated in velvet fur: we are in love. He tenderly
gouges out my eyes.
III. An empty nest
We rise from the burrow in spring,
me and my pups, old for mole children,
one month weaned and eager to tunnel
out on their own, a world of infinite depth
and possibility. In their bravado,
they forget oxygen; they’ll learn.
My prince makes his high-pitched yelps
elsewhere, flushing females out
from the solitary forgetting that makes up
the bulk of our days. Will I recognize the tree
by its roots? That terrible nexus
of too many kinds of beauty. Like Bugs Bunny,
I keep failing to make a left,
churning the Albuquerque sand
like a delusional gardener. I’m sure
the desert is pretty in its way.
IV. A retirement home
I meet a mermaid. We commiserate,
half-rodent to half-fish, as she hugs the shoreline
and I hover at the topsoil, border between
above ground and below. She says the rebellion
has come, describes the scene for the benefit
of my scooped-out darkness. The mole people
walk upright, she says, a spreading pestilence
that overturns crops and claims the upper kingdoms
as their own. The merfolk flop up on beaches,
undulate on unseen waves, raise tridents for war.
They won’t accept another treaty:
You may walk among us if you walk on swords,
if your feet bleed, and you dissolve to foam
when we tire of watching you dance.
I twitch my nose to and fro. I smell nothing.
Can’t an old mermatron dream? she laughs.
She strokes my downy back. She concedes,
no, we are staying in our place, as ever always.
Stagehands
I.
He’ll be a real Canadian yet.
In this toddler’s garden of innocuous nouns
emotions are drawn in just mouths and eyes.
Tense confusion
makes him seem innocent.
Unable to tell the difference
between What did you do last winter?
and What do you do in winter?
he does not reply,
I buried my wife.
He smiles,
thinking it is a general question,
a test of cultural knowledge.
And he knows this one.
What does one do in winter
here, where winter is a thing.
One skis, skates, snowshoes.
II.
At night,