^{after Brigit Pegeen Kelly}

I.

Once upon a time, my father was offered a shovel
and ten minutes alone with the prized stallion—Just don’t
kill him.    Once upon a time, I asked about the apple-
knotted scar on my father’s back shoulder, as he dressed
for work: That’s from when Sammy tried to kill me.
Remember?    Once upon a time, my father accepted a shovel
and the problem of answering violence without loosing
too much blood from Sammy’s chestnut body, nervous
in the stable.    Once upon a time, I watched my father dare
to ride Sammy, who had only known breeding—: things
went fine, until his muzzle grazed a live wire that sent him
bucking, first with and then without the weight of my father
perched on his saddled back. Every witness there
broke open into a song called laughter.    Once upon a time,
my father couldn’t trust himself to spill just the blood
owed, and so chose torture’s slow ember over a quick-
flamed revenge:—for one long week, Sammy submitted
to the pull of hunger, easing his desire through
the narrow stall bars for a mouthful of sweet oats,
and then the shovel’s handle came down like lightning
across his beautiful face. My father did this
twice each day, despite the wounded wonder delivered
upon both creatures.    Once, Sammy escaped
and it took a lifetime to corral again the full force
of that gallop—to gather back the spirit and grace
of that temporary, hot-hearted freedom.

II.

My mother said I should not do it,
but all night I turned the horses loose.
The farmhouse slept, the coyotes hunted noisily.
I was a boy then, my chest its own field flowered by restlessness.
How many ropes to corral a herd?
I had none but a stubborn concern with steady hands
and the darkness of the summer wind which moved right through me
the way the coyotes moved through the woods with voices
that seemed to mourn the moonlit limits of this release
and those who had prayed for release before me.
I pulled each horse through the opened barn doors,
all night out into the pasture with little resistance, all night my hands
buried in manes as if I were descending into a new understanding,
all night my path a way toward recovery.
And then carrying its own kind of clemency, against
the tall forest of sharp pines, the morning came,
and inside me was the deep-pitched presence a howl builds
at the lonely center of its bawl, before the throat
remembers again that other sweet mercy, silence.
The light climbed into the pasture.
The coyotes were crying and then were not.
And the pasture was—I could see as I led
the last warm body to field—full of memory and motion.

When Sleeping Beauty finds the spindle
& pricks her finger & falls into her hundred-
year sleep, everyone around her falls as
well—her handmaids, her grooms, the cooks.
Dogs collapse in the courtyard, horses fold
in on themselves in the hay . . . . I’d forgotten
all that. Even the fire returns to embers,
fire’s version of sleep. In some tellings all
this sleep is a blessing, a solution to grief—
no one will miss her because they will sleep
as long as she sleeps & they will wake
when she wakes, no one having felt
a thing. Is this what we want, to take
everyone with us, to leave no one behind?
To find a way not to feel all the days you
are not here? Some days I wish I could
sleep for a hundred years, other days
I wonder if I’ve ever really been awake.
In one version the curse is uttered by
a crone, in another by a fairy. The castle,
in both versions, as everyone falls &
almost at once, becomes overgrown—
wild roses, thick with thorns, surround its
walls, so thick they will tear the flesh of
anyone who dares come close. When I
tell you I’m a wounded animal this is what
I mean—I am the thorn & I am the spindle
& I am the curse . . . no one will remember
the years they felt nothing.

Isn’t there a bird (what’s its name?)
that collects blue

things—bottle cap, rubber band,
bits of broken

cups—to make an elaborate, sparkling
blue nest on the ground. At

a meeting, a woman spoke of
her brother, who’d just

OD’d—teary,

she said she knew it was God’s
will. We all want to be held

a little higher. Bower

bird, that’s the name, it gathers
all that blue

& arranges it into a nest                               
to make the beloved, of course, 

want to stay.

After the war all that remains
reads as half scribbles of the half dead

language. I stop to eat an empanada,
half butterfly, by the lapping waves

& salivating dogs. Let the poem be the place
we touch our other halves, somewhere

between the parcels carried,
her cotton bag & face—Who is it you

remember? On 9^th street half a sandwich
bares its chest to the public.

No sparrow. No hungry child. Only
half a gesture to feed the people

this country’s long forgotten.
Half a history spreads over

our dining table in waxy scratches,
its grooves undoing the swinging

door. Like you’ve lived here before.
Let the poem be the place

the ghost half haunts & rages at how
we’ve made of the tree—

rain, soil, light—a weapon
with which to close upon

the quiet, half-lit slivers
longing for nothing.

Carpenter ants picked the T-bone clean.

    The dog’s leash tautened toward
          a square of sun.

A hallway lamp wavered.

     Slice of lit motes through
          the cracked bedroom door.

Her slipper under the bed, another on the armchair.

     On the shell comb, a single strand.
          Her blue robe still damp.

*

a narrow bed in an endless
row of beds tucked tight
like chalk-white pills
cocooned in plastic

no visitors no cellphone no
end to night but the nurse
who relayed messages
telegraphic—send blue

bathrobe Saint Jude
rosary lime-flavored
Jell-O chenille slippers
boar bristle brush

*

            why am I here?    

pressed in her suitcase
between terrycloth and silk          

            where is my husband?     

on a prescription slip, scribbled
in her physician scrawl          

            when will I go home?

barely three days before
the words slowed to a trickle

Something of late November
   sifting through a window
brings back this prelude—

   two voices blend, I lean
into the keys, draw back
   when the voices part.

How the body remembers—
    Señora V in a floral sundress,
rose talcum hand soft

   on the curve of my spine
imprinting what she knew
   of love and time. How could I know

what those notes would mean
   decades of preludes ahead.

Suddenly, rain. Our heads
  bowed together like monks
in this hot green place.

   I study the slow script
of her movements. The cross
   and uncross of her legs,

fingers forking together,
   pulling apart. Secret dialect
of her face—a firefly flick

   in the iris, lips curling
like kelp. Speak, mother.
   Your daughter is listening.