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I still taste you from the time you painted my tongue with your scarlet finger. It cured my heart of innocence, that single dose, and I have tasted it— the double truth—ever since: the bittersweet in the words I cannot speak but stick in my mouth like stones I've learned to talk around.
My tongue leapt out of my mouth
when I lied to her and hopped away
to the stream below the house.
Mute then, I started to write the truth.
My tongue turned wild in the stream,
for which I was glad and unashamed.
I listen now from my porch to the complex things
it says in the distance about my heart.
How hard it is to tell the truth inside my mouth.
How much it needs to sing in the dark.
She breathed a chill that slowed the sap inside the phloem, stood perfectly still inside the dark, then walked to a field where the distance crooned in a small blue voice how close it is, how the gravity of sky pulls you up like steam from the arch. She sang along until the silence soloed in a northern wind, then headed back to the sugar stand and drank from a maple to thin her blood with the spirit of sap. To quicken its pace to the speed of sound then hear it boom inside her heart. To quicken her mind to the speed of light with another suck from the flooded tap.
In memory of Ruth Stone (June 8th, 1915-November 19th, 2011)
"All I did was write them down
wherever I was at the time, hanging
laundry, baking bread, driving to Illinois.
My name was attached to them
on the page but not in my head
because the bird I listened to outside
my window said I couldn't complain
about the blank in place of my name
if I wished to hold both ends of the wire
like a wire and continue to sing instead
of complain. It was my plight, my thorn,
my gift—the one word in three I was
permitted to call it by the Muse who took
mercy on me as long as I didn't explain."