I am a body schooling,
a ball of fish, flashing
and many, in these early days
of feeling, of love.

When I learned,
hours ago, of fish songs
that swell like birdsong
in the morning,

how they foghorn or buzz
for food, or mates
or space, I thought,
now aren’t I a humming thing?

Yes, you say,
a body of oceans
and marvelous.

And the sea anemone in me,
              growing on the wreckage
of an old ship—

              can they grow that way,
              I wonder, on an ending—

                          Still this bright and tentacled
anthozoan polyp,
              which reaches and filters
                                                            whatever it needs
                          from this strong current,
              and the current too that carries
                                                            the sea cucumbers,
              the rough mammals,
                          the life, both vertebrate
                                                            and invertebrate,
even the batfish,
                          the black jewfish,
              and the terapontid,

it all swells and breaks in me
like a chorus at dusk.

Every night, I go back to Mr. Jefferson’s place, searching still

his kitchens, behind staircases, in a patch of shade somewhere

beside his joinery & within his small ice house, till I get down

that pit, lined with straw, where Mr. Jefferson once stacked frozen slabs

of river water until summer. Then, visitors would come to him

to ask about a peculiar green star, or help him open up

his maps. They’d kneel together on the floor, among his books

lavish hunks of ice melting like the preserved tears

of some antique mammal who must have wept

to leave Ablemarle, just as I wept when I landed in Milan

for the first time, stone city where Mr. Jefferson began

to learn the science of ice houses, how you dig into the dark

flank of the land, how you seal the cavity. Leave open

just one small hatch through which I might lift, through gratings

Mr. Jefferson’s cold dressed victuals, his expensive butter & salads

the sealed jars sweating clear gems of condensation, white blood

appearing from warm air, as if air could break & slough, revealing

the curved arc of our shared Milan. There, I wore silver rings

on each thumb. I studied & spoke in fine houses 

of ice. I knew a kind of crying which sealed me to such realms

for good. Old magic weep, old throb-in-throat. How much

of my fondness for any place is water, stilled & bound

to darkness?

As a child I made things 
out of clay—a pig who

could not be eaten, a mule  
who refused to carry

anything other than a pig 
who could not be eaten.

They were companion 
pieces. They kept each

other company, and me. 
We kept each other’s

secrets: what flesh can 
do with clay, what clay

can do that flesh can’t. 
I was a small child who made

small decisions. I made big  
people angry. I made them

confused. I 
refuse, I refuse.

I started out in the Virginia mountains
with my grandma’s pansy bed
and my Aunt Maud’s dandelion wine.
We lived on greens and back-fat and biscuits.
My Aunt Maud scrubbed right through the linoleum.
My daddy was a Northerner who played drums
and chewed tobacco and gambled.
He married my mama on the rebound.
Who would want an ignorant hill girl with red hair?
They took a Pullman up to Indianapolis
and someone stole my daddy’s wallet.
My whole life has been stained with pokeberries.
No man seemed right for me. I was awkward
until I found a good wood-burning stove.
There is no use asking what it means.
With my first piece of ready cash I bought my own
place in Vermont; kerosene lamps, dirt road.
I’m sticking here like a porcupine up a tree.
Like the one our neighbor shot. Its bones and skin
hung there for three years in the orchard.
No amount of knowledge can shake my grandma out of me;
or my Aunt Maud; or my mama, who didn’t just bite an apple
with her big white teeth. She split it in two.

The heavy black bulk of the draft horse
lay in the heat, circled by lime. Too huge
to bury, it was left for flies, night animals.
We walked around the gleaming hill
of its flanks, the nostrils tulip-blue,
tiny terrain of the pink gums,
belly mushrooming sweetness.

Too timid to touch this mystery
we were old enough to know
this was his final
beauty, this laying out
on meadow grass, beside aspen.

That very afternoon we had chased the Holsteins
home, their full udders sloshing
warm milk on us as they ran,
their gentle lowing a quiet happiness.

Elderberries and wild raspberries
had caught at our skirts
as we trotted toward the old farmhouse
where Mrs. Chesrown was scrubbing the milk buckets
in the hot sudsy water and the final light.

Sun glinting on a black coat:
twilight closing over earth,
a time of evening that pinches.
I glanced across at my pigtailed twin
as we re-entered the gate of the farmyard.

She had grown this summer and her knees
looked knobbier, her legs, gangly.
Her face said: You too, you too.

 

The hitch hiker asks to look at

the palms of my cold hands

and thanks me for unfolding them

on the frost-edged

picnic table between us.

While I look at his downcast eyes

trying to see if he sees,

nearby truckers stare

at his narrow face,

long blond hair.

He asks me if I garden,

rips a scrap of newspaper

and folds it up

into a tiny origami

package for anise seed.

Here, he says,

seed I gathered in Oregon,

plant it in Colorado.

I always have a garden, he adds,

I plant and leave to others.

He tells me he has no sex;

when you ride in the righthand seat,

you have to nod your head

without listening.

Face pressed to the window,

he can see the lacquered edges

of the earth.

So I imagine him 

practicing calligraphy

on truck windows,

recommending honey and vinegar

in a glass of water

every morning.

Mad, mad, mad.

A yellow warbler,

the moon at the bottom of the stream.

Out on the highway

he is raising his thumb again.

This is a poem on my other’s body,
I mean, my mother’s body, I mean the one

who saved her braid of blue-black hair
in a drawer when I was little.

Meaning one I could lean against — 
against not in resistance. Fuzzy dress

of wuzzy one. Red lipstick one.
Kitchen one. Her one to me,

bad-ger bad-ger — 

or so I heard. The one body I write on

like Daddy’s blank studio wall
with my colored pencils.

About seeing her skin

as she bathed in the afternoon — 
was I five? It was summer.

Then today’s winter where again
I call that bath to mind.

I cannot leave her body alone.

Which is how I found Mother in the bath
escaping the heat of a 1950s house,

Father on a ladder with blowtorch
to scrape the paint off the outside.

•

badger badger

•

The sun in the suburbs
simmered the tar roof over our rooms

in the town where only wasps lived
inside paper cells beneath eaves and roots.

And they hurt very much, the wasps.

•

Now I am sixty. Sweet as dried papaya.

My hair, a bit tarnished,
my inmost, null.

Memory is failing away
as if an image shattered to shards then

recollected for a kaleidoscope:

I click the pieces into sharp arrangements — 
grouse, crow, craven
 — no, now, my own daughter turns sovereign