.
dawn light empties each shallow
cough and dies sagging against memories.
we were a quickened lick
of endurance … now we are
ash, like our brother’s
ash, whether mistake or choice.
once we shared guilt and hope, now
even that shadow has washed out,
gone.
you.
and him.
.
how I will miss you.
how I will long for
our tribe, shattered now.
.
empty houses
surround me, ghost murmurs
and morning light, so painfully
brittle in winter.
.
.
like antlers inside
the deer’s skull waiting, waiting
for the time to sprout,
an old discord lies
ready, blueprint laid
inside my skull, same
.
architecture as
last year’s discord,
ready to sprout, grow
.
upward into hard
familiar shapes, tools of
combat aimed to wound.
.
grown not used, what
then? do small deer
curse their useless antlers,
tools impotent or do they
clean them well against limber
tree trunks, carry them
indifferently then
shed the lovely shapes,
satisfied?
.
may discord
.
dissolve into
impotent clean shapes,
lovely, rubbed clean
and left discarded in some
overlooked valley
of friendship.
.
.
old leather, dark as
dirt in spring, supple, second
skin against my skin.
.
the shape of my hand,
limp on workbench, my foot there
on the floor, alive.
.
i mourn worn out boots,
leather gloves lost as if my
hand, my own foot.
.
Jacked up on old fantasies
of fierce men with guns
and fists tough enough to take out
Spaniards hissing at my long hair
and Mexicans, Italians touching
my breasts on streetcars
I’ve got this cowboy
combing my hair.
For now all the borders are safe,
home on the range.
.
Back in the north in the winds
in the late spring blizzards freezing calves
still slick with the snot of birth
I may sculpt dreams differently.
His moustache might tickle,
could direct spirits to spin
tighter casings around my heart,
kicking the handyman loose.
.
In preparation I savor moments
like single pomegranate seeds
bursting sweet across my tongue.
I gather him to me and feed us both
on tender moves, animal lust,
creosote blossoms and
wide,
wide
clean valleys.
.
There are days I go wandering
through bars looking for him, small
and Irish and drunk and laughing and
warm as amber. He escorts me on his arm
proving we mean something, pins me
to his filthy lapel, a foreign legion badge from
a culture once visited, deserted now for toothless
old men and women rough as splinters
underfoot. My feet stick to the breath of vomited
beer and my fingernails stick to the breath of strained
smoke and my heart
pries at the bottles
for him,
long lost from a ship plying Vietnamese
waters for drug-spliced lists describing some future
fist now in his face.
The old men drool at my name and their hands
describe my curves as one woman though they
must see two. Their rheumy eyes cling to my
neck, gagging me with the rags of their dry
fingers, probing my waist with their faulty
memories, though I pity.
I let them paw
for my cheap pity.
The women with missing front
teeth and fingers in brassy nicotine
gloves wink, laughing. We’re all on the same
sinking island, dribbling sand in our eyes to see
all the places it’s been
while he talks on about politics straighter than
I ever will, recalls survey line names I’ve long
forgotten, making me wish I was drunk Irish
and safe from my own:
something as easy as a wall
built of bottles.
I will walk home before dark
stinking of rape and cordite,
alone.
.
Your fear of water pulled me up
by my hair, thumb on throat
ready to press and a look in your eye
that I ignored knowing. I bet
that usually works.
.
You boys wear your war
like four stars, three
for wounds, one
for the good measure
of the victim you insist
upon conducting.
I know a woman
reeling post-traumatic stress
across three states. They
call a man’s armed combat
and we call hers family.
She didn’t get to go home
when her tour was over.
.
I laughed at your thumb
ready to kill me and
your cold eyes
light years away.
You boys, always insisting
your games are bigger
and harder
or meaner.
You are always
more interesting
to yourselves and I have
never feared water
in any form.
.
Her life is thick
as a fist full of loose hair
I am fragile beside, gossamer
threads frayed, straying like
split ends,
flyaway off my braid.
.
I used to wear dust feet
to walk ditches
and disappear in alfalfa.
I have forgotten.
Deer browsed beyond fences
behind the east eighty.
I didn’t watch them
when I was broken whole, we
already knew each other.
I have almost forgotten
all those sweetgrass dreams
full of sweet peace
I used to hum. Something like
mown clover.
.
I hold my thick braid
in two clenched fists, keening.
My sister will adopt me tomorrow and
her son will wrap his small fingers
about my fists.
I will head for adobe as if I belong.
.
Watching him while
he sleeps I
steep myself in the
tea color of his
skin
vanish in fragile
lashes
hopeless against his
cheek, reappear
stroking long hair off
a temple
with one of my small fingers.
I memorize the
unusual curve of
a hip
heft of his dark
testicles
resting promise of
his quiescent
cock curled
softly.
His sturdy shoulder his
brawny arm draped warm over
delicate ribs.
With my weightless
vision I cherish my
lover
astonished,
reverent within all of
our variances.
Three mad dogs of Indian country
howl at noon, all upside down like that
and sleep right past the moon. Bewitched
by liquor dreams, wrongs long gone yet
still fresh on their pickled tongues,
three mad dogs of Indian country
expect life to be short as the little war
this morning when Sherman knifed
his cousin, red blood spitting down
dust. One moment, now, is why these
three mad dogs of Indian country
look for salvation like puppies,
all that cast, no point.
.
Their mother says it that way.
All her life, men drop out
and daughters run on,
young tears, old laughter,
replenishing the supply.
I am so lucky not to
love my sister’s husband.
I would steal him if I loved him, no
mercy would survive, my blood is thinner
than semen, my morality
more sicilian than german, my
passions glow alizaron crimson.
I would have to
fuck him to oblivion the way a virgin
simply could not do.
.
Walking her to the altar
is something
I can do for my sister.
.
orphan poems 