If I could sleep in the slipskin of moon tonight I would.
You are written across my life, a language I don’t yet speak,
the silver cursive of you swimming through my bones.
How did you get here, by rowboat
by wing
by copper thread?
This vellum womb you push through, this chrysalis of the body.
You are my lost season, a tangle of new leaves and grapeskin.
My suckleberry, my kindred swimmer.
Already you pull your tiny boat to the shore,
already lulling and tiding,
already ebbing, my tiny moon.
The gods of gold carp and chardonnay have made a romance
of my body and I welcome you to this shore, new love.
I welcome you to the dream of my hands.
Let me kiss your wet feet.
*
Portrait of a New Mother
Morning shrieks out yellow to be held. I am the day’s mother,
so I reach out and take the hours in my arms. Fog fusses
through the trees. I give spring equinox a kiss, tell winter
she will be okay, everything will be okay. The roses stretch
their necks a higher hue of chartreuse as I tiptoe by, say Look
at you. I’m so proud of you. You are so big. And rose turns ballerina.
The wind resists her nap, wakes the leaves who slumber
under the umbrella table. The squirrels reject their pajamas.
The doves must be teething again, all those low moans
constant as dusk lands peach and gray. I turn myself
into a sycamore to hold the doves who each coo
for their own branch. I grow seven more arms.
Dinner sobs crimson on the stove, the broccoli drooling,
tomato sauce sputtering, the water boils mercurial.
My husband’s silhouette asks Sweets, how was your day? I move
to hug him but the moon clings to my arms, legs, my neck,
refuses to go to bed again, her own light too distracting,
kept awake by her own rambunctious shine.
Summer. Late light. Clover.
Clouds pouring high over the fields.
Stone wall. Fern. Luminous Birch.
Loose brick holding back door.
Upturned pail, mouth full of dirt
and dandelion seed. Broken dish.
Tender instep of rotted leather sole.
Abdomen swelled spider toiling
between fence post and barbed wire.
Water bidden from the pump.
Darkened nail. Wandering Jew.
Queen Anne’s lace. Beggar weed.
This cornfield is dried coral, yielding only
tiny cuts as I pass among its rows.
The wind is barn yards, dusting tussock sedge,
which bends like seaweed in slow, billowing waves.
I should’ve been born on the sand, my subjects sculpting
castles in celebration of my arrival.
A babe swaddled in kelp and pearls.
Instead I creak in an old inapt rocker
by an open window. The rusty smell
of a screen. The sky releases like a pregnant
grain silo. There’s salty rain in my veins.
The door draws down to the back porch steps.
It is almost dusk or almost morning,
moon or sunlight having spilled itself
somewhere just outside the frame.
Inside the house, a lamp sheds a heartbeat
of yellow incandescence. A stray moon
is going to set (or rise) out of balance.
The sun has already gone down on its old sad wings.
These back porch steps are not on any
waterfront; no sea and no lax tide push
against inky rocks. You and I have lived
in this dream: low alders or bushes in the alley.
No stately plane trees and not a single linden.
In this narrow alley there is no horseman.
Tonight, you tell me that you see looping
eucalyptus and a solitary moon, some kind
of path, or maybe none, an enchanted forest
that has nothing to do with dawn or dusk
falling or rising in this alley which is nowhere
near the sea, no horseman whatsoever waiting
moon-drunk and solitary on a weed-
green paving stone to celebrate the kind
of light that’s isn’t even here
behind this sad brick house.
In the photo, you cannot decipher
where the signpost enters the water
and its reflection begins.
You cannot see the current
doubling back in whorls, looping
around the diamond yellow sign.
How it dips and pockets
like gathering commotion.
The photo does not show the suspicion
that, underneath, something has organized—
it suctions and pops and tosses the surface
of a river screaming hungry, gone mad.
In person, we wonder
if the thousands of yellow bags lining its bank
are teeth. If the whole city-sized thing is mouth.
It thunders past our shoulders—
licking bridges, swallowing trains.
In the countryside of Ohio,
in a house surrounded
by a forest where night throws
the moon's bright coins
beneath dying elms, I lie in bed,
alone with my wife. We glide
over sheets like two water striders
straddling air on pin points
before sinking into sleep.
2.
In sleep I am a miner gouging
the sour belly of the world.
My hands ache from the kick
of a jackhammer, my back
and legs buckle from the weight
overhead. My wife sleeps
with a river at her back;
its current polishes her
skin until she glitters
like the beginnings of fire.
3.
We wake and shower,
water needling us to consciousness.
Last night's dreams swirl
down the drain like a slow cyclone.
The road to work takes us
over the offices of the dead.
As the beach warps away from her,
blurred by Mediterranean heat—
driftwood branch, a martyred gull,
the only flaws in a vista slick
with consonance; as she drizzles
sand from a loose fist, certain
even a trick of weather—typhoon
clouds boiling suddenly across
the vacant afternoon—would fail
to move her (just as you, briefcase
open under umbrella, seem
not to have moved in twenty years);
as the boys swim farther out,
she smells a fire, spots ash
snowing the sky, and wonders who
could possibly be in need of more
heat on such a day, who felt
the sun wasn’t enough to endure?
Like dogs, way back behind the lot, we slip
in and out of sun, we keep the belt
clenched in our jaws, we wait. There’s trouble here,
there’s trouble in the bricks, the backseat, slouching
in the bathroom sink. But we’re on the nod, we’re in
the sweating jungle of a dream: The tangled
human knot that held us back is gone.
The truth’s behind us like our thinning shirts
and hair, the drop of blood that siphons up
black tar: What you can’t face, we tuck into
our veins, forget. So call us dregs, say what
will let you sleep at night: Swallow our names
like we are no one’s sons or daughters, cold
as the night we melted through the door like ghosts.
