DIGGING WITH MY FATHER
When we roll her into the grave, one leg
catches on the dark clay, running on alone.
The first being to die in my arms, she sits
three days before we bury her, death always early.
We tie dishtowels around our faces, sling her bloated
body into the wheelbarrow, take turns breathing.
She dies tied in the truck when we transfer the herd.
She is our best mother, but old, the first goat we named.
The strong one, who won’t feed her young, knocks
her down. The kids pitch and rear, struggling clear.
Her neck collapses as the twine slips tight. I yell
for my father. Her eyes bulge white.
I dig my fingers beneath the twine.
It will not break. My father goes for a knife.
I want to remember him running. The kids buck
wildly, hooves kicking clear of death.
I pump her dead legs stupidly.
My father hands me the blade.
I have never cursed my father.
Faltering hooves grow quiet.
I hold a dead mother goat.
My father brings the wheelbarrow.
POETRY CANNOT SEAL A DOOR
It is a promise leaving
invisible shards everywhere.
But memory is fast
as water or a wolf spider,
slipping despicable legs
through impossible cracks,
blithely racing an old red truck
around the wrong side
of a moonless blind curve,
birth lashed to death in the back.
Sleep with me, it says.
Its future bleats a b-flat note
crossing the bridge north,
as if pain could sing time,
home a gash of color,
quick as my brother’s fist.
I sing of a nightmare bird
fixed as a heart,
spiraling tight in a gale,
face dripping with liquor.
I squawk a nonsense
made of black sports cars.
Or at least my brother does.
I only wish to.
Bullet-shaped planets circle.
My mother pulls a gun.
Her skin falls like an onion.
This our tongue-and-groove kitchen
a trap so sprung with love,
it snaps a hole in half.
I sing of an old man
wandering a bleached ward
wielding an oiled set of swords
halving life as silently as my sister
whose pink hair pulverized
box, saw, and magician.
The bath is empty,
the water long cold.
The old oak fell.
A bell echoed
like a prayer.
And this hand
reaching out.
REVELATIONS UNDER THE GREAT OAK
The tree is gone cut down or fallen the past a useful fire
though oaks play at death winter flies a plucked set of wings
a nail-scarred skin the confident hand of love long dead
it is wonderful to hold the world inside your breast
The teacher tells us the emperor’s advisor displeased him
then on the block thought this: as council I advise
against injustice as good subject I must die
so whose body is this mind a severed thought
a place exists where children sit struck dumb by youth
a woman’s words and a gauze dress a young tree
I’m sure this shade stands so tall we can all fall in
and I’m sure more than flesh exists so many hours
here inside it but a breast? there is nothing
not already here she said parting her dress
the tree was never there except in her flesh this is not my body
she said skin bright as hope our blindness infinite
the advisor fled a mind is only half yours
she says and beware of anyone who saves
the tree is surely gone but years later I carry a body
up the mountain winter hands clutching an axe
