Unsent Letters
posted June 9, 2009
pour la photographe
[Lunaria]
Do you have your glasses on; do they touch your face and leave
a faint mark, self-portrait as tender as toothbites on the wrist
of someone with whom you only intended to say goodbye?
Does the light glancing off them move towards or away?
[Dracaena]
With the insistence of palm fronds,
I am a smooth, flat, pliant thing, wound up
to such an extent of tension, to such a hard point
that my mind is neither giving nor receiving, neither
space nor substance. My mind is a mould for a tool.
[Palmata]
Some of this dulse bears calciferous patterns, like stone honeycombs; others, neon green nipples, indiscernibly floral or faunal. I lose myself consuming long tatters; I knit them through my teeth and down the gullet, warts and all, wondering how such things let me live off them, as you do — simple, necessary, and redemptive even of the general ambivalence of life.
[Thuja]
The air of forests in the north
is always cold as heavy cloth
laid over the clay of one's own
heart in the cautious studio of time,
to gauge the capacity of the animal
you will become once kilned into
hard imperviousness, then forced
to utter human words that crack
the mask of all your wilderness
into pocketable pieces of lore.
(0)
righteousness
posted April 30, 2009
in sleep your hand is
warm and heavy, soft across
my breast; just a dream
in wakefulness, when
your hand's a bullet, it could
punch right through my chest
Mirror haiku: two true but opposite images illuminate one subject.
(0)
First Words
posted April 19, 2009
My mother spoke to me
early; I was swaddled in words.
“Will I? Am I? Do you think”
she said, until I understood these
were questions I was being asked.
I took my mother in soft mouthfuls
emitted to me alone in a room.
I heard my own name and kicked
free of myself like a knitted boot.
My mother spoke to me all the time.
She wept and cast me to the ground
like dice, until fate changed one day
and I not only listened, but heard.
It was summer on the prairies.
Locusts sang, until in their winter
silence, I could finally speak back.
My mother spoke to me, but it was
long before I understood that
although she was saying “daughter”,
what she meant was “sister”, and
the only one listening was me.
(0)
Pre-occupation
posted April 8, 2009
In sight of paradise, but out of reach of gods,
we don’t blame the girls, or try to tame their
unkilled wanting, their gazing outwards,
nor stop them when they go to the highway
beneath veils of snow and passage, capes
of thick black hair across their shoulders.
It’s said they never wash their light-thieving hair —
otter-gleam, androgyne, cedar smoke — but instead
pour oil over each other’s scalps, work in ribbons
of warm liquid: oolichan, Oregon grape and larch.
Drawn down by comb and hand, soft fingers of family
migrate bone beneath head skin, shine each strand.
What oils, what answers? Salal, hemlock or spruce?
Their eyes skirt questions and are heavy with unknown
resolution; they’re set upon the highway, while I look
to them, gathering something sweet from the frostbitten
wild. How I long to bury my mouth against their napes
and apologise for the guillotine of our very presence.