veil, cape, tunic; sensible grandmother shoes.
She wonders: How could she or anyone dance and not
enter with history? How does gravity, the law of the present,
perfect the dancer? The stretch at the barre, the leap and lift
reflexive as religious exercise, condition this moment.
On pointe, we are all sore-footed pilgrims performing as
our bloody footprints dry already from dressing room to stage.
RISK MANAGEMENT
History’s sculptors released their gritty gods
and animals, grimace of prayer and chisel,
avoiding faults. On pedestals
eroded figures hunch in stone,
the subjects subdued in museums.
Hammered and priceless, immortal and harmless,
none may be rained on, or touched
by exhaust or imprecation, nor lived among.
A LONG ENGAGEMENT
Tickbird sits in Rhino’s ear: trik-quiss, her hiss
and crackling sets his very horns on edge. She plucks
and crushes ticks, then sips the opened wound,
beak pressed to blood, blood the better food.
But what symbiosis is utterly benign? Who
wants myth’s arrangement falsified by fact?
BIOPOIESIS
for creative writing students
You wish the ancients’ tricks were so easy still:
Bury a young bull (which first you’ll have to kill).
Be sure his horns poke through, above the ground.
Let pass one month; check back as bees surround
the stinking mush from which they seem to rise. Alive
with fresh direction now, they build a hive,
select their queen, make royal jelly—muse;
they dance in air a map, or perhaps a ruse.
The nectar quest will turn their sips to food
that makes more food to sweeten and do good
your midnight heart as it weighs a slaughtered bull
against a swarm against gold drizzled toast. Call
this sequence “causal fallacy,” post
hoc, yet between us, isn’t most
of what we trust a mystery? Our faith
in one wildly written life revitalizes death.
HOW IT BEGINS
At two, you learn to mulch short rows beside the stone fenced orchard.
Your parents fork then rake through compost, easy in their chores until
startled by a shadow twitch, your mother ekes out
the name of your father who, now unfocused, lifts his head, as her keen edge
guides his gloved hand courageous toward the sunny stripe that parts
rye grass from granite. One foot long, the dangled snake reveals
its copper back, its belly private crimson. Toddle a fresh furrow,
earnest in your boots. You lean in to kiss what you hadn’t known was there.
Close by, the apple trees hum, your mother’s bees fuss in the petals.
NEAR THE END
of the Periodic Table, #79
The Golden Years do
bare ghastly elements
vastly attractive to
rejuvenating ads:
face filled in
by botulinum toxin
or spackle. Truss,
sling flab and that
floppy wobbleneck.
What droops firms
by goop, whitening
for yellow feet and teeth.
Sallow cheeks sag on
jaws now jowly,
hold their own classed by weight
as gold, we know, is. Atomic
Number 79. Pronounce aloud
its symbol, Au. Awww.
On another table, fill with awe
your bowl, the late fruit a little
soft on the surface. A windfall.
MAY CONTAIN A GEODE
$5.99 per rock in this bin
The odds are 80/20. Not every one’s a winner. Each the size
of your father’s closed hand. History opens like a cave,
a mind, more rock. Your geo-tool is close. You’ve chosen
not to open the rock. You already know past the crust
what you’ve seen in field guides, memoirs, museums. It’s there
you believe, caught you believe in every closed hand, wave
or particle, the light just for you undisclosed.
INEXPRESSIBLY
Of course that’s how silence reveals itself.
I want to hear it but there’s the beep
of a forklift in reverse; there’s the ringing
in my ears. A bug crashes against my
daughter’s high frequency curls.
Refrigerated food breaks down despite the cold
and there’s the deafening deconstruction
of this make-do bookmark, this postcard written
by my mother days before she died. In church
the interpreter wears solid colors, a curtain
behind her hands’ deft evocation of God
whose beguiling privacy unsettles
the heart, the “lub” addressing its twin,
the other side of the river
where women wash work clothes, the shift-change
siren of sweat released into larger bodies
of water, where a sister’s hand will slap
the surface, introduce rhythm by skipping a beat.
THRESHOLD
Let a fast place, with one door, enclose thee.
—Rule of St. Columba
Atop a wave, a narrow door floats—blue
against the lake’s