The wind has come up  
and now there is a cloud behind the mountain.   
How many times did she tell me the story   
of my birth? The story ended when she’d say,  
and that was the happiest day of my life, and  
I’d feel a little sad because I’d had no child  
and would never have a day like hers. Sometimes,  
I can see the river bottom and its glitter  
of stones. Then a fish leaps in sunlight rippling  
the surface. Sometimes, I listen to the birds,  
our seers, the pileated always laughing. I’ve read  
the dead in dreams are never dead,  
and yes, it is their aliveness that is reassuring,  
their going on even as they leave us here. Just now  
the shadow of wings, and a far-off child’s voice  
shouting  Hey, Mom.

All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s 
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North 
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere 
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads, 
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge, 
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say, 
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I  
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver  
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end 
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that 
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it, 
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy. 
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.  
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs, 
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around. 
Parades, in spite of—Pride, in spite of—Please, someone answer all my 
questions about hummingbirds and the little futures we are 
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,  
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on. 
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned 
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your 
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo 
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can 
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But 
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go 
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.

You like to fight. You desire sweat  
and snap of bicep,  
thick resource of thighbone,  
shouldering aside obstacles. 
You like to thrust your way in and find 
something hard and real to go up against— 
call it a wall, call it 
your brother. Call it the angel  
who came to wrestle 
but was forced to bestow  
a blessing. Strength is a woman  
with her hand knotted in a lion’s mane.  
Yours to claim or disavow.  
I wield no gun,  
slingshot, nor lightning bolt.  
Only the memory  
of membrane and synapse, 
how you once had to belly-crawl 
through my very body 
to get into the world.  
I live in you as beauty,  
call it spirit or flesh, 
call it a swift elbow strike  
to will the wall DOWN 
that separates—let mine be the blow  
that wakes the castle 
from its dream of parapets and spikes.  
Let mine be the courage  
of the trembling tongue 
that confesses its true need, 
so you can lie in my arms, a cub again 
at last, a sheaf of immortal flowers.

I think about him still. The lone boy  
standing at an edge of the obelisk  
at the crack of dawn playing a tune  
I’d never heard, warm brass with cinnamon tendrils,  
then sudden sweetness—a furtive gecko painting its tail  
across the unfolding. You are right to ask  
what a seventeen-year-old girl was doing there.  
I was a runaway. It’s no tragedy. I had meant  
for an epic rebellion, but was gently held,  
my days thrilled from end to end. A bygone era.  
I couldn’t tell you what I was doing. I only know  
that I stood three meters from this boy, his skin a hue  
even deeper than mine in that city hell-bent  
on drowning us under its weight.  
 Gray and blue and purple wafting behind him  
more ancient than any ruin, even as they slide  
into light. He grew me into something else, this boy. 
Something no longer a child. Stale smoke  
on the morning air, a tang of espresso beans.  
 Head upturned, eyes closed, casual  
as the first raindrop, he slid a nocturne  
in C sharp minor between loneliness  
and solitude like tucking a hand under  
a shoulder blade. Perhaps this, my skin engulfed  
in morning dew and music,  
is the true human romance.  
Immune to purpose. Just a hinge  
between day and night,  
the right to be a body in its body.

I was looking for an old knowledge  
I could make new.

    Dehorn your cattle when the sign’s in the legs. 
    Kill a barn swallow, get blood in your milk. 
    Dig by the moon’s dark, prune by its light. 

I read all afternoon in my office on the third floor. 

A passage on shovels reminded me  
of crossing that one green pasture with my mother

before we buried her mother again, closer 
to our dead kin, the dairy bootleggers.

The dead can’t sleep if you’re always making noise, 
but I have never known a soul with my blood 
who wants to sleep, once dead, more than four days.

The women, especially, are always wanting 
to wake up, shiver in the grasses, sigh.

The worst pain of my life, I was far from the South, 
holding my belly, screaming in silence,  
and one came to me, ravenous, her eyes widening.

Taking my pain in and in. Like a lover

after a too-long, anguished absence  
drinking, as much as they can at one time, 

the expressions,  
freckles,  
eyes of the desired. 

I don’t know who she was, but she belonged to me. 

Her grave had been left open overnight 
leaving her to grasp after our awful music forever.

I felt myself all the way down 
to be full of sons, sons I would die with  
tucked inside, 

so when I found out I might be rounding with a daughter—
I had to walk many miles

when the sign was high in the knees 
and the knees were bent in snow

and sap, freezing in the trees, split  
loud slits up their middles,

lines a child pried open to enter

dug, but not yet cut by me. 

there is a new big problem & the problem is the students  
have started setting up shop on the quad with their tarps  
& tents their hand-lettered signs they are cooking vast  
pots of soup they are hi-lighting Fanon & scrolling Tik-Tok  
at full volume they are starting a kind of school I am leaning  
in the kitchen of the administrator’s house pinot bright  
in my glass it would shock you she is saying how good the new  
algorithm is matches a faceprint in seconds even through  
a mask she sets a timer wipes her hands of course the fees  
are extortionate she laughs but the system will pay for itself  
if something were to god forbid actually happen of the threats  
on letterhead the teargas & beatings on stairs she says I  
was young once too you know I get it you can have your views  
but at a certain point       in the other world a Shadow 
scans the stalls of a market fresh fruit body heat a keystroke  
& a distant turret turns        she stirs the pan tops off 
my glass shallots cook in butter evening leans into the arms  
of the trees outside well okay right yes she says did you see  
the new one where that French actor plays a young Bob  
Dylan & sings all the songs himself & sounds actually  
pretty good weren’t you impressed don’t you think that  
was a risky move I swallow & say I agree I agree I am saying  
as a streetlamp snaps on revealing a grid of freshly  
mown turf clippings bagged & lined up at the curb a trail  
in the lawn where someone dragged them we’re getting close  
she says putting in the garlic & the fish

We rented a small place by the sea.
For a few days, we could look out
across a widening expanse of blues. Nights
beside the water, more stars. You traced
Orion’s Belt against the dark.

I hoped to be free of seeking attention
from the external world, which always 
overwhelmed my art. Yet, in my work
there were times I could give myself 
over completely to matters of the heart. 
In the sand, I watched white-breasted gulls

return. You could spend lifetimes 
in the shadow of other people’s wants,
and you have done it many lifetimes over,
said the mystic, brushing my tears 
from the cards. In my work,

I was adept at constructing niche
dioramas of the heart, long hallways
for certain sorrows to brood in, and sudden 
windows facing westward to gaze upon joys,
until, one morning, I found my own joy
dead in the yard. After that,

I woke repeatedly into a persistent dark.
So you see, I often said, I have lived so long
with a vacant heart and what if our love
turns to sand? You take my hands

into your hands. Our small place: the sea
is illegible at night, except for its solemn 
crashing. To be drawn into oneself, then out
like the tide, is that love? Or is love

what shore remains? 
By the sea, everything seen
is seen lightly, shadows of wings 
passing over sand.

Sand-gray desert siren, a roadrunner  
             froze between creosote, confused 

                          not by prickly pear or pencil cactus,  
                                       but by fumes choking the road’s throat.

A toddler nearby tensed at each  
             tire’s shriek, his hand crushed inside

                          his mother’s as the roadrunner  
                                       swiveled its head as if looking for his

before darting west, then north,  
             then west again, this time    

                          toward a canyon whose creek,   
                                       after a meagre snowmelt, 

was ringed by thin reeds, skeeters  
             careening between them. Don’t, 

                          my mother had warned when I crawled 
                                       from beneath mesquite, 

lizard’s tail dangling from my fist.  
             When she tried to stop    
            
                          bulldozers from collapsing bighorn  
                                       habitat, I ignored her, grabbing

whiptails, dung beetles, centipedes.  
             Now the toddler,

                          eyeing flecks of fool’s gold glowing  
                                       in a chunk of sandstone          

slips free of his mother’s hand 
             to flop in the dirt beside the highway. 

                          Can he feel dunes breathing  
                                       beneath his feet, aquifer dwindling

but still rich as his own blood running?—  
             Or does he hear only the groans

                          of a desert emptying, ravens massed  
                                       in the valley to scavenge. 

We were living in a blue room, somewhere near  
the coast. The trees were tall and green as sleeping men,  
bent against the wind. There were blackberries,  
apple farms, roaring waves of storms. Long December  
foghorn nights, the distant tinny ringing of a bell.  
We watched the ships go by, the seagulls flock  
and spread. We stayed up late and read Neruda 
in the dark, returning every nerve. So close it seemed  
the other person’s body was our own. Eyes for eyes,  
hands for hands, waiting for the other one to come.  
It wasn’t beauty but a lack of time. We saw the stars  
dissolve, the shifting range of blues against the peaks.  
Mountains in the distance. Black hills. Moon. There was  
a time, a period of days and nights before the end.  
We were living in a blue room, and we were happy.