On the Sesquicentennial of the Burning of Richmond
One hundred fifty years ago today, they set fire as they fled. I sniff the wind for ashes, imagining how smoke would have rolled off the hill, how much of what was, gone. It is another day in this house with you without you, April second. Most moments I am not sure what to feel except sick to my stomach, remembering occasionally the Vergil quote I chose for my high school yearbook caption: Amor vincit omnia, love conquers all. There is a chill, and I think of turning back on the heat, notice the cat has puked on my best notebook, wonder what there is of today that I can toss or burn. Yesterday, it was a stack of books & the still-unopened bottle of saké I brought back from Japan the year my mother died-- if she were here she would say why, why is everything you write so sad? The day before that, two faithfully languishing cactus plants; I felt ugly seeing them in the supercan. Because, mom, I never learned how to stop being conquered. The cat settles between me and the keyboard, his rumbling, his querulous warmth comfort to us both.
Color theory
my head turns to follow the camaro as it blurs gleaming in June sunlight; There is no color as candy blue you say, & it is just another round with the heavy bag as we cruise swerving riverward a hot back road, windows down, my skin glistening like metal. i smile and duck is so, i say, & you bob and grin and i wish every Sunday were like this: fistless not-at-your-face fights where you just brush my cheek and we ride, river- wound and sticky sweet, instead of sitting like regrets, side-by side plucking apologetic petals that fade. love is not pink.
Evanescence
some things are too easily forgot- (ten), like the wire to the champagne cork, twisted to separate the front door key from the back.
i miss your two oclock river- heart, the train- slowing beat of us in deep afternoon light, how i used to run back to that spot by the bridge and find you waiting.
there are places where air has more space to breathe, the skies heavy wrung out washrags damp with dirty sunshine.
in air like that train warnings hang lonely, remembering things like champagne, its bubbles the very metaphor for hope.
i wish we could have kept each other from falling. i want that song caught between whistles, about running till your sides stitch up, about two riverbank lovers still on the edge of something.
beneath a pillowed, dripping sky
i have never walked through cotton fields in fall, picking the cloud from their prickled finger-y heads.
i think it must be like what the poet meant when he said i can write the saddest lines tonight, the un-
doing of dream from stalk, the end of a season. i imagine your calves naked in the whiteness,
the scratch of stem on stem. i imagine your hands, a pale cloud-reaching, empty and empty.
in the span of eighty years, the saguaro cactus, sensing imbalance, can begin to grow a single arm. while seas sink, their floors creeping up, the air grows dry as if from a bathroom door left open after a century-long shower. what will last? i have grown arms in much less space. i insist too much on grand declarations. the blue blue of sky cleanses even the mold of canyons. spiny and full of thorns, love is a thing of myth, like a desert cucumber. who are you when you stand straight and arm- less?
love by the river in springtime is a perilous thing
the sky is bruised with purpled patches, gauze of white cotton cloud strewn unsteadily across the southern horizon.
many have come with their beach chairs and their expensive long lenses to watch the herons chase each other round
the naked winter nests in the farthest branches. i watch them watching from the pipe bridge over pregnant waters, the little islands
sunk beneath the brown and the rushing, tree roots emerging from the current like strange seabirds that reach for the sky. from the squawk on the other side of the river,
i know the herons aren't in the trees. they've found higher ground among the shallows and play their love games, as we do, amid the rocks and the shadow.
other consequences of a high water table
raindrops cling to low-slung graves, each soul dead without a fear of drowning.
lichen covers tree limbs and lichyard; time is slowed to the speed of waves. This is a no-wake zone,
i joke as we drive through standing water, the big houses on stilts but the funeral home
flush with the marshes. i wonder if when they turn on their flatscreens with remote flicks
from sofas sagged down by the stains of so many salt-damp years, they listen
to the news of ISIS and middle- eastern wars and missing college students and feel like they're
from a different world, or if they think of dark waters, and that there are worse ways to die.
It was never quite like this,
the shallow wading pool of past, its pink mermaid-clad collapsible sides filled with dead grapevine Mom wrestled from the cage-wire fence & sunk in its bathwater depths to be made more pliant for the working. Once I buried a burn there, dip’t surreptitiously from a showoff jump on Old Miss Judy’s just-rid bike, my shiny white shin in stark relief to the gap-black teeth of her red- haired grandson. I remember, too, the stains of walnuts that fell like dull tennis balls all around the pool’s pressed grass; a quarter a bucket all Indian summer long while Mom cut & shaped & dried under the shade of the bitter leaves. I keep one of those wreaths cornered in the utility closet under winter coats, still, dusting its thick ribbon & fluffing up the bow after every first frost has passed.
in this poem, there are no herons.
there are seagulls. their awkward crying fills my dreams, pre- pubescent squawks for pity or breadcrumbs which leave me lying damp in the cold cotton windingsheet that couldn't hold you. go back to sleep, you said, untying the darkness with the corners of your eyes, me standing naked and musting on the cigarette- scorched floor. so i did. pulled up my second-best lace panties, the shades down on another lost Saturday night. regret fills your space to my left : that your toes no longer touch mine. that the sun still came up.