Poem for Saturday, January 18, 2014 (2)

In Passing

When they buried her, they could not
understand it all: the aroma in that room
born from hot lead and lavender, the
shrill cries of the newborn rising from
the crib down the hall. Years afterward,
they maintained their habits: kissing her
framed photograph before leaving
the house, stacking the dishes after meals
in the same manner she had done.
When her birthdays came, they always
mentioned how beautiful she was,
how her hair was brighter than a
thousand suns.

Poem for Saturday, January 18, 2014

To Explain Venus to a Mongolian

I remember the night the three of us walked through
the dust back from a small shop hollowed out in
battered Soviet concrete. Little Orgil, pig-tailed and
smiling, cupped an apple that seemed far too
large for his hands. That bright star, I told
his father pointing northward, is not a star at all.
At this, we stopped. The sky was a black sheet.
What do you mean, he asked. To explain
Venus to a Mongolian, it is best if your words
are like our own planet--a bit broken, spinning
in circumlocution, simple in the grand scheme.
Tell them that we live in the third world from
the sun. Then tell them that what they believed
was a star for their whole life is the second world
from the sun. Wait for them to ask Really? 
as per their custom. What I remember most was
his amazement, the moment of his comprehension.
How he gazed down at his son, face sticky
with fruit, and felt the need to take his tiny hand
in the dark.

Poem for Sunday, January 5, 2014

Dreamcatcher

What guards you, then, is a willow hoop:


inches in diameter, webbed with blood-red
yarn, adorned with feathers and beads, first
tied together by Ojibwe hands, brown and

splintered, a stone's shot north of the Great
Lakes. The stretched quadrilaterals, those
subconscious gatekeepers, filter out that

which longs to haunt you. Someday, one will
break tradition and seep through. Worry not;
simply wake up next to me. Feel it shrivel,


like so many things, in the heat of our sun.

Poem for Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Cathexis

I.

Freud said Besetzung--an occupation, a
taking possession of. I am no psychologist, but
I am inclined to agree.

II.

All winter you have made it your mission
to keep the ground purely white. You sigh when
you see frozen heaps of ashes. You cringe
at the sight of crow's blood smeared against
the snow in tiny flecks.

III.

You never tell me about any of your childhood
memories.

IV.

When the snow melts here, it takes part
of the ground with it. When the next snow comes,
the cycle repeats. It is beautiful. It is meta-
chemical.

V.

You make it your mission to wake up with
the sun to see if it will pierce through the fog.
You drink your coffee while the sky is
aflame. All winter you do this.

Poem for Monday, December 2, 2013

We Laid in Those Same Fields

There was something about the position of
the sun, like someone tossed it skyward and

it got stuck in the oak branches, dripped fire on
our clothes below, like someone had that kind

of power. Did you have that kind of power?
Your daddy bush-hogging in the distance, we

laid in those same fields, learned to make small
talk, to feign interest in the shapes of clouds and

how to flick invisible mosquitoes off of each
others' hands. I had so many questions then, so

I asked one: why do you pluck the honeysuckle
petals and arrange them on your dress but never

taste them? Later on, we laughed as the tractor
stalled and your daddy cursed in the heat. That is

when I wanted you most--when everything was
torrid, when calm and chaos existed together in

those few quiet seconds. There was something
about how we laid there, the history of the grass

underneath your slender back. How people whose
names we would never know probably bled on it,

cut it down and watched it grow back again like
nothing ever happened.

Poem for Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Breach

You reach for something in the dark:

your hand, a delicate foreign object, slides through
the membrane of my dream.

It lands in a wheat field. I stand in front of this old
farm house. Red and white paint chips from the trim
rain down like confetti.

Your grandfather, whom I have never met, is there.
Real men, he says, break their backs. Real men
have thicker blood.

He begins to ascend. I look up at the sky. It is the
exact same color as the veins in the old man's neck.
I make the connection.

I start for the field then. I find your hand between the
golden stalks and begin to pull hard. The sun whispers
that it just killed Icarus.

It takes months to see your whole arm. It takes years
to see your eyes. But I stand, I pull, aging in the heat:

my back broken, my blood thickened
until I wake and after.

Poem for Sunday, November 10, 2013

Meantime

Someone is trying to describe the sky, thinking
of synonyms for gray. Someone is dancing in
the devil's evening shadow. Someone is peeling
potatoes and sniffing the skins before throwing
them away. Someone is burning an effigy, and
someone else is feeling the heat under their arms.
Someone is saying I love you in an empty room
and meaning it.

Someone is picking wildflowers and giving them
Latin names. Someone is obsessing over dark
matter. Someone is eating toffee and suddenly
missing their childhood. Someone is relinquishing
everything. Someone is dropping a vase, seeing
their face multiplied in tiny crystal fragments.
Someone is saying I know in an empty room
and meaning it.