WHAT TO EAT WHEN YOU WILL NOT EAT THE DOE'S HEART

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Butter beans poached in the garden’s green balm,
tender as forest-boar liver. Caramelized slab of potato,
sweet as apple from any royal tale. Two girls’ honed gazes;
children too charmed to know that evil cannot die dancing
in hot iron shoes. A mother’s newborn fennel, her emerald
mustard, her babiest kale—musts for the gullet. Yawps
of abandon, firm as the hogshead’s firmest blueberry
bounty. Each supple, each brittle blessing. One salted
glance into the mirror across the room at a crone-so-soon.
Distance and myth and time; their braided bitters.
A father’s nightly antics, his honest fare forwarding
autumn’s hunt. Lovage, for whatever plagues the heart
may also, rightly, burn the belly.

 

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THREE SWEET LEAVES

After Grimm’s “The Three Snake-Leaves”

 

You think you’ve married someone kind

of like you. And you have. Like you I need the stars,

their opal arch, but you take to the field for sky

on dimmest nights. I watch from a window.

 

We think that we have married Love,

and true enough. Though some days find the beam

of sweetness wilting thin, no longer swollen-honey

to the glance but tired on the tongue.

 

Yet we are some of those old lovers tried

and molded by the lifeblood kindness holds,

scolded by the snake of wisdom we find wrapped

around the homely Hackberry’s lore—its animal bark,

 

its green sweetmeat. Each young leaf offers up

a healing. Two held to eyelids and one held to lips

jolt a lover: Start back from the heart. Their touch

scraps the vile-look and its forked tone’s

 

fits-and-stops toward love’s starvation.

Let hackberries feed our yardbirds into song. Let

perfumed blossoms wreath our throats by noon.

And, always, pursed and pocketed, the leaf times three.

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THE MOON AND THE SPOKEN WORD

           for Eudora Welty who, at age six,

         felt the moon in her mouth

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A flat moon

in darkening sky 

shone into a sphere. Moon, 

smooth as white marble,

sweet as a grape on her tongue.

Moon. It gleamed into shape

and soon left her mouth for the sky.

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The clock in the hall

clicked glass and gold on her tongue.

Star and cup, cotton and coffin,

she hoarded words like jars of summer

fruit. Not to ward off hunger

(hunger itself so lean, so good a word)

but for this:

To hold fast the night and the light.

To hold fast the shape and the weight

of a mouthful of moon.

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A CHILD'S EVENING AT OAK GROVE CHURCH 

for Uncle Clyde  

  

I had run barefoot from wet vetch,

from the fat green orchard

to jump my brother and land him

face down in red dirt road.

Then my mother led us by the sleeves

along to church where my father 

sat me down to smells

of hymnals and polished oak.

 

In the corner of a back pew

to the song of the Blood of the Lamb

I curled and dreamed of gnarled sumac

and sweet metallic juice

of early apples.      When I woke up

it was to silence thick as pitch

and just as dark but for a hush

of moon in each high window.

 

Remembering, I feel what the boy

could not: my heart too loud, the moon

too bright and distant. I found the great

doors locked, the transoms sealed.

I clambered up stacked chairs

and through a window. I walked

forever home, unwilling

witness to the darkness that was God.

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BEFORE WE SLEEP YOU SPEAK OF MED SCHOOL CADAVERS

 

I.

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You tell me the heads

are draped in gauze at first,

face down, for easier entry of student blades

into the backs of those they’ll love

before the whole thing’s over.  What begins

as terror cloaked in banter, ends in gratitude,

the intimate gift of the open body.

 

You tell me you’ll return the favor at death,

your body a lesson beneath somebody’s pry.

Your hand below my shoulder blade

you trace a right angle: the first cut,

you quip, a flap of the skin’s tenting

into the human soliloquy.

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II.

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Cadavers are oily to touch.

 

Once you left the lab for lunch

and ordered Italian beef;

formaldehyde stench on your hands,

the sandwich damp and gray—you couldn’t choke it down.

Each day at the lab you wore the same clothes,

reek so persistent you torched them at year’s end.

 

You joke, you’ll tattoo your chest NO CODE,

and on your back a dotted line, CUT HERE.

 

III.

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Here, for the skin of your back, a tattoo,

indigo bio-script wreathed in trumpet vine:

 

            I treated the poor and the old,

            sat at the penniless deathbeds

            of silent women and men,

            listened to veterans

            exhume childhood grief.

 

            Taught my daughter

            to drive in bad weather.

            Grew orchids, shot targets, made lists,

            stacked books. Kissed.

 

            I hated to be interrupted.

 

            I once looked into a patient’s throat. 

            Surprised at what grew there I said, Oh shit.

            Dear Reader, I’m your text now,

            your legend, cover to cover.

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IV.

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When head is at last unwrapped and face appears,

skull awaits saw. But harder than the face, you say,

the hand, that plucked a shard from the ball of a foot

or spoonfed hungry young. Hand that lit fireworks

and poured cheap vodka down.

Embracing the face or fisted in rage

the corporeal totem of the hand,

angelic, monstrous.

If not proof of Body’s Soul,

then proof the body’s obstinate grist might do.

 

V.

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So they will search you,

muscle, nerve, artery, ligament, bone,

not knowing how you

slept beneath these three thin blankets,

your hand at the base of my head,

my hand at your spine’s low arcing,

 

how we drowsed, dream-moving

to the ceiling fan’s whir,

Death at the window on its dogged watch.

Beneath our hands,

blood and breath rendering time.

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WHAT HOLDS

 

The sycamore across the street sloughs skin

again, brown scrolls littering gutter and yard

 

until my driveway hoards bones

hollow as the femur of a hound-sized finch.

 

I overstep furled tree husk into car

thinking: sycamore bones and winged trees.

 

Thinking: everything’s always shedding

what can’t hold. Vapor and chaff, endometrium,

 

egg, lint and hair and the misused marriage.

Stories left like rafts from childhood wreckage.

 

The less debris the nearer to some

un-substantiality? As if a sycamore loses

 

not just bark but, ring by ring,

finds radius of some core translucency.

 

Same light that holds this bole of self,

its restless roots, its spew of song, its brief skin.

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