Fence of Sticks (audio only)
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It fell to me to tell the bees, though I had wanted another duty— to be the scribbler at his death, there chart the third day's quickening. But fate said no, it falls to you to tell the bees, the middle daughter. So it was written at your birth. I wanted to keep the fire, working the constant arranging and shifting of the coals blown flaring, my cheeks flushed red, my bed laid down before the fire, myself anonymous among the strangers there who'd come and go. But destiny said no. It falls to you to tell the bees, it said.
2004
The wind blows through the doors of my heart. It scatters my sheet music that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys. Now the notes stripped, black butterflies, flattened against the screens. The wind through my heart blows all my candles out. In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy. From the mantle smashes birds' nests, teacups full of stars as the wind winds round, a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows or is blown through the rooms of my heart that shatters the windows, rakes the bedsheets as though someone had just made love.
2010
1 My mother always called it a nest, the multi-colored mass harvested from her six daughters’ brushes, and handed it to one of us after she had shaped it, as we sat in front of the fire drying our hair. She said some birds steal anything, a strand of spider’s web, or horse’s mane, the residue of sheep’s wool in the grasses near a fold where every summer of her girlhood hundreds nested. Since then I’ve seen it for myself, their genius— how they transform the useless. I’ve seen plastics stripped and whittled into a brilliant straw, and newspapers—the dates, the years— suppo
1986