I have space in my heart
for two trees, uncoiling.

They look as though they’ve been twisted in summer,
in peace. In mourning and defiance.

I see them in the Saturdays we spent
breathing out flies, sucking sand into our throats.

The air smelled of honeysuckle and weeds
and I found myself looking up

to where God might be. The times I bowed down in prayer
and imagined Him noticing.

No, I think, this was never conventional. The land
that I dream of – the love I envision.

Moons I hold in my palms,
actions carefully collected and swept under rugs.

If the sun and moon
balanced on my shoulders I think I would melt under their weight.

Oh, sweet gravity. Faerie days – I plant my trees under you. I run my fingers
through your sea. I pray and prostrate

and find the ground rushing
to meet me.

I want to come back right
into this one, pick up right here
when all of us are home, and most
of us are okay—maybe not ecstatic but
who can be that all of the time and wouldn’t it be
enough, coming back, to just be
okay? Is there a place I can guarantee
this moment, this particular evening with its slim
sky and beaten grass and dirt-worn
children and my husband with his wide
shoulders and bannister arms, his mouth sad
because the day is sucked under now, tide out
and back again which means all of it is gone—the frisbee,
the worry, our youngest’s fastball pitch, the unfortunate tick
boring into my skin and which my husband extracted with
needle nosed tweezers probably right
as the tick transmitted Lyme into me, maybe doing nothing
or maybe causing future aches or devastation, the tick
now a tiny heap of itself, flushed down with the day and its
wonder of pre-summer in which each stalk, sedum,
bindweed, Boomerang Lilac comes back against improbably
odds—winter, draught, rodentia, neglect— right to the same place,
same branch, same patch of scrub blooming as
though shaking its head, yes, I’m back
and what of it? Are you good, they seem to ask,
are you more than that, are you okay again?

appears in the attic—suited, unshaven—
and waits until I’ve finished
hand-sanding floors (original 1890 pine, stained, lacquered),
waits until the room is ready to reveal himself.
Bed made, blanket chest heaving our wedding quilt,
reading lamp, extra pillows for the new guest room,
which Mark Twain claims, his face now
in the oval mirror neither my brother nor I want
from the discard pile of what parents offer.
I take pictures of him, send them instantly to my brother,
point out mustache, jaunty tilt of cravat, matted hair.
See if you can get someone else to show up,
he texts back. Maybe if I angle the mirror.
Maybe if the light hits just so.
Maybe if I find a rug. Maybe if I move
the luggage or tend to piles of old papers—
great grandparents I never met, term papers carried
for years, state to state, crisp-edged and graded,
photos of people I can’t name
from trips I cannot even recall taking—
here, an easier, earlier version of me,
banana palms loose and flapping in the background.
Here, all the boyfriends, their letters, a baby
I did not have. Maybe if I get a window shade
or have a stakeout. How long to wait for someone else
before accepting it’s just Mark Twain, here to live
in the small guestroom at the top of the house
with no heat, no bathroom, not even a closet
from which to burst out and scare me.
There is no one else. We do not get to choose
which ghosts come to stay.

For an hour after learning of his own father’s death,
my father stood by the phone looking out at the empty yard. I
was ten years old and had never seen him act this way.
I’ve realized since that I had always seen him focused on a task—
carrying fresh cucumbers out to my sister, heading out
into the early morning fog to go to work, cutting wood
for our fireplace during the rainy winters. For an unsettling time
he just stared at something in the distance I could not see.
Later that day my mother came into my room and told me
what had happened. She needed to drive to town and wanted me
to stay near him. Make sure he’s not alone while I’m gone,
she said, then, before closing the door, added quietly,
This isn’t a good day.
Nearly three decades later, I found myself
standing in that same terrible silence. Like him, I have been unable
to tell my son what I saw in that first hour of grief.

the mathematics of suspension
occurs in resurfacing, piecing together the
pieces, the wood of the tree, sleeping
through November’s extra hour,
the Scorpio moon, mind lathered in soap
and the unholy trinity: snakebite, basil,
fallen leaves, the end of the equation
a question mark.

the theory of regeneration occurs
beneath the surface
a clockface with no hands, a death-wish
tucked up my sleeve
reconciliation
for the descent, the drifting,
the stillness of a body witnessing
life beyond the water’s screen.

what is rose and what
is the thorn? why bother breathing
if it only takes the wind to bend my knees?

I don’t remember―

but I wrote as if I did.

I told you about my bed and my clothes and the silence,
and all about the color blue, and how I don’t have it in my bedroom
or my bathroom or in any of my kitchen towels.

I said it wasn’t my favorite color and that when I describe water it is always a
shade
of green,

because seaweed is green and lily pads are green and some summer storms
express
themselves in greens, and all of this is reflected
in the water.

Even my bath soap is green so that, when I bathe, I swim in a green-hued milky
pool.

Speaking of reflections: sometimes I look into a mirror―a long mirror―and
notice
that my blue jeans cannot be named a variant of green,
so I have convinced myself that there must always be an exception
to every rule and my jeans will be that exception; the only blue
in my universe. . . .

. . . if it weren’t for my eyes which must have been open and innocent―attractive―starring up into his eyes as he did this thing to me. I don’t know, maybe.

His eyes were not blue; this is the only thing I remember.

In monarchs’ overwintering groves, there were once so many butterflies that
the sound of their wings was described as a rippling stream or a summer rain.

Center for Biological Diversity

Small child, dark husband, roving hand, the man who discovered
places in me that no man should discover so early; first whispers of
marriage innocent and pained; my two children requiring more
comfort but pushing me away. A girl inside the woman
still seeking some flicker of love in the eyes of her inaugural abusers.

These companions of soft soul and sweat and the many nights
I felt them traverse up the stalk of my body to milk me
of nourishment until I had nothing left to deem a living body.
What beautiful cocoons we make of our grief.

I bear out each narrative thread by the warmth of my own persistence,
poems that pool into a risk of imaginal cells. If I told you the monarch
was a puddle before it winged, its liquid frame
in no way resembling the hoary worm that ate—and was eaten—
for the sake of its restyling, would you believe me?

Every seven years nearly all our human cells are replaced.
I remember all of my old pains. Seven years have passed poem by poem
by poem, lone tears digested, wombed needs—no community
of wings. And now I hold this creature lightly in my hands, the air
scented with indifference, look up into the sky, open.

Hill 937. Let me offer you from Sa Huỳnh
copper bowls and lingling-o, that double-headed
amulet of milky nephrite green. Our ceremony

calls for this. Now hold my spirit steady.
At its base, regard my grandmother—some one-
thousand, seven-hundred-sixty-eight years later,

south of Đà Nẵng—coded daily with its embers.
Enemy of State or Enemy of Earth, who could
channel differentials, that which hunted people

like a nation in a nation? Let me offer us that
monumental sconce meaning: nobody heard you
burning, but I heard you burning, comrade.

Rise up. For that evidential dawn might shimmer
tempest red, our later modes of slaughter or address.
So let me rise up with you, comrade, shaking off

these golden embers from each wing. And let me
tell you of our people and our beastly creatures
walking with us—double-headed oxen and red

double-headed lions—resurrected with dark brass,
carnelian, and jade. I’ll meet you there, upon a hill
inside a country, that which hunted years

into a ceremony, that which called us skyward
so one day I’d meet you, ma.

I. I was channeled, spoken by that sunburst.

II. Vaulting through wide crevices of noun, our rooms were filled with music.

III.  Only then described by reoccurrence, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote—There Is No
Question—but our spectacle of green. And you were channeled, too.

IV. To vocalize as such, to multiply, that build-up shone among our bodies. Voices shot up through these stems.

V. Voluminous and gossamer, I piled every flower on our altar.

VI. Red flowers then burned.

VII.  In lying down, I glistened. Vestibules were parted, hungering like bushes. Then that sweetness came and left.

VIII. That was our preservation, offering up prayers like a scent. I could not amplify.

IX. Adjacent then.

X. To varnish without drink, to drink without a cup, that water drank us slowly.

XI. Sparrows stuffed into this wall inside our empty room, though nothing more could shock us after 1963.

XII. Then costumes changed. Each sparrow gripped a knife between their tiny beaks. An olive green was varnished, clipped, subsumed just like our own.

XIII.  Who stole away, lastly, each flower from our altar?

(1)

it is a tongue holding itself like an ear. its rims can’t keep

their shape. they lisp into the mattress, leave the sheet

apostrophed against the wall, head slapped, gagged in froth,

dreams tipped, bound in bruise-fade.

in the morning it is an eye. it draws white-flash fences

on its locked doors. where are the tarps that were

always being hung, tall, reflecting their stains back

onto the skin? the feeling that even having a tongue

makes it evil, and especially if that tongue were spinning

over an ear. loose a tire, suck in language that

is always the stomach’s shafts and axels slipping.

in the morning it also finds that it has dreamed of

contact lenses, big as a hand, dry and crooked. lick out

the mouth’s inside till it is round and stripped.

it wants to be the tongue rubbing sore the wet teeth but

has more limbs to air, cloth hutches to cut and bolt.

(2)

Before I put on my glasses the book forces itself on the poster

which peels into its circle in glue stutters, matches the cracked

cover’s swoop, just as easily scurries when my brain cuts the

dimensions. It liked being deepened, I can tell by its shadow’s little

shudder. The commisure of sun and fan like a certain smile. I

dreamed a yellow badger was on fire but wrapped in a wet page

emerged unharmed. I slept on my glasses and dislocated their

wires, a fish skeleton on the wall. A trick of the light like being sure

you’re bleeding when you’re not, or that, unthinking, you’ve

slashed the brittle irons of a thing. Without glasses it’s difficult

to walk down steps. The stairwell is sucked into a stench of distance,

cheeks bowed, gagged on hellos and green daylight tapping glass.

Things are too thin or too thick, and things I didn’t say yesterday

try to dry their dribbles on my reflection’s lips, the ones made only

of light: its hand on my back, breath down the necks of potted plants

horny for the hope of water but held in a dust rut on the lens.