Our Winter

Mid-January and winter has arrived at last.

The branches droop beneath the snow of two

Storms. No bird has sung for us in days.

I have read of winters so cold, so long,

The birds fell like leaves from the trees.

Always war is raging nearby or the smoke

Of the crematorium has smeared the snow,

Like a gray, vague, indecipherable rubbing.

No bird in my backyard falls from a branch

That doesn't catch the air beneath its wings

And swoop off into the wind with a kind

Of triumph. I have never been shot at either.

Yet, in the next county, a man

Was dismembered and his body parts used

In a ritual with no better purpose than

The resurrection of some long dead devil.

Not forty miles from here, a girl of sixteen

Was hog-tied and set on fire by two brothers

Who confessed she had teased them with her

Body. One brother accused the other

Of dancing to the rhythm of her screams.

Each day, I watch the birds. This morning,

A cardinal sits hunched on a limb --

As if I'd mistake him for a bloody fist.

A Painting

The manner erotic, the content savage:

death as functional as hard, black blood;

ideas, the tines of sharpened teeth

ridged along the dry broken jaw,

wielded with the broken rhythm of warning,

rhyming with human emotions never expressed,

turned mechanism as they encounter flesh.

No murder, she thinks, in self defense,

no sanctity in dying for what you have,

conceived as if in some forgotten life,

the rushed act vicious and reciprocal

as the father once his trembling kill embraced.

Her stone heels crush the wolf’s skull.

She clutches the bitch’s cub on her hip;

the organs in its belly churn and moan.

Her double sleeps nude in a hayfield,

dreams only echoes of spoken images.

The noonday sun has bleached her body.

New blood clashes with the white flower

she clutches like a palpable madness—

paranoia reconciled with satisfaction.

Men cross the reaped fields like clouds.

Sly grin a facial scar, eye

a mask, the fox, with delicate paw prods

her breastbone to further impersonal hunger.

His tapeworm nestles in her rigid belly.

The innocent shivers, pointed to pluck—

act as fruit; sibilant utterances

convolve a desire for color like a gravity,

a dream of odor, a lust for god. Words.

The medium is flesh, her flesh, and his

desire. She does not desire his flesh.

Hidden eyes spy upon them, winking,

blue-hearted, otiose flowers whose own

languid adulteries are with the brief bee.

Her keening awakens her clockwork cock,

who’s all but forgotten to exist since she

left his island of sand to wander the mist.

His senses agitated by her loud exit

into absolute intensity left for him

as a maelstrom between her parted lips,

he speaks to her, cramming knuckles

in his dry mouth, about the end of silence:

Your aching . . . your violent . . . your body.

Song For An Old Tree

The birds stripped the old tree

Of its fruit

In a single night.

Was it a dream, how they descended

From the sun--

The ravening eclipse?

Thirty years, not a stump remains

Of the orchard,

Only a field of mown grass.

Where the roots sucked everything

From the soil

There are shallow bowls.

My two girls appear, one singing,

One shouting,

Beseeching with arms wide.

Each day I reach up like branches

Into the light

To be devoured by caresses.

Ornament

And tomorrow is Christmas,

the heart’s havoc with delight.

Downstairs, the unnatural tree

dressed in glass and light,

pulses with memories.

Will my daughters see the ornament?

Will they see, as I saw,

watching for hours once,

the orb darkened by green-tinseled boughs

radiating needles,

crystal spark moon beam

still and silent as time itself?

Will they see the heart

that moved two hands to place it there?

The Spot

As a child, in times of transition,

moving in, away, or up a class,

I’d choose a spot of no distinction,

eaves elbow or dirty pane of glass,

seen daily, in passing, from bus or car,

and call that spot up to memory,

my own version of a wishing star,

proof not everything is temporary.

Solemnly naming the spot my own,

commanding it, above all worthier

bits of the universe, to stand alone,

I’d whisper, If I do not remember

this spot the next time I go this way,

even if I remember some other time,

all that I have seen and done today,

and this spot, will no longer be mine.

So many years later, I still attempt

to make of humble, unnoticed things

what they do not seem, to exempt

the passing car or the cardinal’s wings

from the stopwatch’s oblivious tick.

But now the simile and the metaphor

so complicate things that when I pick

a spot that should mean no more

than what it is, like a broken sidewalk

or tree stump—you see what I mean—

the thing comes alive, begins to talk,

turns to words on a computer screen.

Miro's "The Farm"

Revenged in sleep, yes, a good omen:

volcano, eggplant, hawk feather

conditioning a moment of pure certainty,

instead of remorse. Birdsong dissolves

the hard black shell of their dream.

She breathes deeply, counts the number

of all those living and gives thanks.

Her skin moves over bone like sad music,

a lamentation of slow recognition.

She thinks, The next is tree across a gorge,

a trick of the eye, a drunk’s progress,

the balanced walk soon elbows and knees,

the hopeful ephemerality of creeping

going lower, the rigid belly at rest

on the gnarled limb tapering to a twig—

pointing finger arrested in emphasis.

Fear zero, the unimaginable destiny.

She twists her body like a swimmer turning

backstroke into butterfly, affirming

things still work beneath the bedclothes.

She stretches to call the nurses: sun

a push button set in pale blue sky;

water can, milk pail, red tile, hedgerow;

plowed and seeded earth pocked by rain;

rafters, stepladder, goat bleat, cockcrow;

the fox’s daily raiding of the hen house;

the baby’s naked footprints in dried mud;

snail, calendar, chain link fence;

stones everywhere, endless hard work;

how her back bent beneath wet laundry,

milk, hay, dung, branches, children;

how it arched aching when her sun-fired

husband’s body pierced her in the shade.

The holy triangle: husband, children, self,

grown geometrically into a power of itself.

She remembers the fruit silk and sap smell

of the tree that grew in the center of the yard,

its branches arms with a hundred umbrellas.

In autumn, its shapeless, colorless body

stood like Death attempting resurrection.

Euphorbia (The Marriage Plant)

It is sometimes mistaken for

the crown of thorns.

Rooted in a two gallon pot,

the mottled spurge—

false cactus, candelabra plant,

hat rack cactus,

dragon bones—

thirty-five years ago was

one small stalk.

Now it’s man-tall, a dozen

bunched, angled,

and deeply scalloped branches

with black thorns.

It does not flower in captivity.

Its acrid milk

sap is slightly poisonous. In India

they brew up a hot jam to purge

rheumatism.

It rots in much water, thrives

on light reflected

off pale walls.

Cut and pot a limb, in a year

it will look exactly like the mother

plant: how we render it eternal.