Poems

From Instructions for Use:

Telling the Hive
 
Knock first to get their attention. Call them out of their city,
away from their industry of pollen and wax. Break the news
 gently, inserting the name of your dead. Say what you’ve rehearsed
about the comfort of ceremony, the soul waiting just offstage
 
and angels wandering in, taking their places on the ceiling.
But in fact you are here to multiply your grief by the number
 of wings that will carry it. To make a relic of sweetness.
To say, each absconding is new whenever it happens.         
 
And the ones behind it, the line so long it disappears.
Tell the hive this is not the worst that can happen, but it is
 the last. Tell what you disbelieved that morning until the fog
cleared and you saw its bare branches. Tell what the earth
 
was doing to itself that day, the hills greening up, covered
in starlings pulling the pale wet bodies of slugs from the soil.

The Big Note
 
 Pours like honey
over the earth settling
into holes we call the holy places
full of God’s longing for us.
 
The note seeks out pipe
organs. Splits trees like lightning.
Sets off thunder, typhoons,
picks up fiddles and accordions,
 
plays them like a newborn.
Anything for our attention.
The hatch of a new dragonfly
vibrates in the key of C,
 
composing self-portraits in its scant
measure of life before the trout
leaps. We spread our share 
of the note across the oceans,
 
all fish feeling our tune—its bend
toward death—along their sensitive
sidelines. We sing their bodies plastic,
unhand them of their only weapon against us,
 
our love for their lives. The note breathes 
in the stingray and the whale,
in the deepest marine heart.
Breaks the surface to join
 
other timbres rising from the earth,
takes notice of how often
we turn its kiss aside
forgetting
 
how much of us is salt water,
how much of us is music.

When You Ask About My Grandchildren
 
 I say the scar where my womb was cut
            out is a dirt road through fire-marked forest.
 
I say imprints of fish have been found in shale in Wyoming
            thousands of miles from the sea.
 
I say the human ovum is an infinite set
            of nesting dolls telescoping.
 
I say when I clip my fingernails on the patio,
            ants carry the crescent moons away.
 
I say my voice has become a violin with all the strings
            missing,
           
every word true and silent as my grandchildren
            playing in the next world.
 

 

 
 

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