There's a War in My Country

for Mahmoud Darwish & Yehudah Amichai

In the Levant, human violence appears late
in prehistory.

A slit in the sternum, a knick in the skull—
the worn, warm skeleton,

unearthed & stained
with millenia's diverse

mineral sediment.
Indentation like a crater,

gentle slit like glacial rift—
now we make holes, to look like wells

to ten-thousand-years-from-now sextons,
and violence, to them,

may not be lamentable,
it may be itself lament.

___


My prophet distances himself from me
and gives me children who leave no trace.

I am bereft
of spring.

My prophet nears me
through children's blood,

sticky and sweet, it
evaporates

in summer heat.

___


Time
washes everything & nothing & truth

languishes. This
is not work for the mind.

Internal organs speak
an imperative to live.

I lie down with that imperative, at night,
in my bed,

I will the bullets
Slow—

breach my heart
later.

Three Poems

Creationism

I gave the bathtub purity and honor, and the sky
noctilucent clouds, and the kingfisher his implacable
devotees. I gave salt & pepper the table, and the fist
its wish for bloom, and the net, knotholes of emptiness.
I gave the loaf its slope of integrity, the countertop
belief in the horizon, and mud its defeated boots.
I gave morning triumphant songs which consume my pen,
and death its grief which is like a midsummer thunderclap.
But I did not give her my tomblike woe though it trembled
from my white bones and shook the walls of our home.

Tremble

My neighbor is velvety and kicks serious game.
So sweet garlic refuses to hang tight
in his mouth. He pulls women to his wide chest
each time as if he's won the Lotto. He rocks
them gently and gentler. My neighbor
is a master spooner. He knows not of desire, but only
the rules of engagement. He says, I miss
having Skype on all night so I can listen
to your breathing. He floats in his museum,
of gams, drifting from frame to frame.

Aubade

Beyond the limits of myself, there is you, a wind-wave
of fading light on a square of cottage pane,
a final mix of golden prairie in my mind.
I am the impoverished heir of blackened gum quarters,
your crosswalk & roofline of foul pigeons. Dear Sibilant Stir & Kick:
see that tall grass on the ceiling, that burst of dusted corn,
that sky advancing its phalanx of irritable clouds?
I rest my hand on your thigh beneath its silk chemise,
so like a mid-surge surf of turquoise sky stilled.
Whichever way your shoulder moves, there's joy.

Dear P., IV

Five seconds to open a parachute, one
that smells like terror. I am a river and
you a body. When your body fell into
the river, you informed it, ignored it.
I handled you as a half-masted plank or
wooden vessel. When I received you, it was
night. The constellations broke their
vertebrae arching to see you. I stumbled
over myself to key you into my folds, river
of error, river of dirty whiteness. Now I know.
If I press hard enough on my eyeballs, I see
geometric shapes and stars. My love for you
is something like this. It is there like
the stars but nothing I can grab or free.

Dear P., VI

As a girl, I cut fruit out of paper and set up
my own fruit stand. I cut out paper apples
shaped like hearts. Everything was open
air and seasonal, fleshy and ripened. What
happened was the consequence of some
action. What yielded depended on how
many apples I set down to cut. Now
everything is bearded and uncaged. Now
everything is steeple and sparrow. Even my
heart is a paper heart. It stutters in your
presence. It maintains its thin shape so that
it can easily slip in and out of you. And when
you laugh, that delirious laugh, it lifts with
the force of a bullet exiting your pistol.

Dear P., XIII

Someone says it is difficult to write poems
that are both domestic and ambitious. If
your small round head is my earth, if I have
concerns only for the internal affairs of your
body, then how am I too not mining waves
of concentric circles outward? Our home has
more than four sides. There are wars in rooms,
furniture in formation. If I am your domestic
servant, why is it assumed we are domestic?
That we are small and petty, that we are
controllable, unwild. You betray me over and
over. I play you and prey on you. This is not
domestic. There is no plaid sofa here, no
salad plate, no bingo hall, just falling bodies.

I Remember

you wore
a sprig

of eyebright
when first I

met you
remember when

at close
of day

I asked you
what it was

& you said
eyebright something

to remember
me by

What Then

what now
ask Euphrosyne

Euphrosyne is good
for memory

& eyesight
flowering as

a common herb
a parasite

of meadowgrass
feeding off

the roots for
remember

to forget is
a common verb

She Belongs To

the family
of Foxglove

& when
unfurled

displays
her two-lipped

double & triple
lobed corolla

into which
bees stumble

drunk
with memory

of sweetness
& honey