Push Coasts

By Vera Katelyn Wilde

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Home Shore

Sting-Bloom

Mommy

Gold Coast

Right to Silence

Right to Bear

What Do Irises Want?

Vet

The Shadow

Safety

Feral People Overrun the Town like Hungry Cats

But We Should Take No Souvenirs

A Recipe for Melting It Down

All the World’s a Set

New Coasts

Visiting Paris in a Blizzard

Night in Flagstaff

California Morning Sky

Three Roads Diverged

Your Daughter’s Voice

Ok, Then

Nerves Before Our First Date

Night Picnic

Witch-Sister

Spinning Fire

Listening Sound

Getting Out the Demon Box

Push Coast

Back and Gone

Hiking the Hermit Trail

Watching Wildlife in the Grand Canyon National Park

Briefly in the Promised Land

Riding Storms

Pitching Camp in the Ozarks

Company in Green Ridge State Forest, Maryland

Vasa Lisa Advises You On Getting Out of Dodge

My New Address Book

Books Are Blood

Flirtation

Urban Camping

November Morning, On the Way

The Poet Speaks of Shame

The Gospel of Heraclitus

Home in the World

Give

Nobody Told Me

[ ] ←

Yes, I Have Been A Translator

There Was A Little Girl

Reverse Hecuba

Anna K. Walks Away

Wtf, Butterfly?

A Pretty Poem About Signaling and Flowers

Raggedy Thing

Wild Horses

This Is My Raft

This Is My Tent

This Is My House

The Sociality of Dreams

Rainbow From Above

Dawn in Time

The Listening Heron

Stain Louis

Showing Up to the Mistake

2 Corinthians 1:3-5

Every Day

To a Tiny Tree in St. James’s Park, London

Walkabout the Thames

I Will Be the Truest Thing

Dreamers Rise

To Be Given the World

Acknowledgments

Thanks to readers of previous incarnations of this project, including Jeff Kind, B.R. Cohen, Mark Schwartz, and editors at The Georgetown Review, The New York Quarterly, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Opium Magazine, Feathertale, Thema, Amalgam, The Science Creative Quarterly, The Guardian, and The Christian Science Monitor.

This book is available in print form from Amazon.com (ISBN 978-0692505557)

as a free ebook download for all ereader platforms - wildethinks.com/push-coasts-ebook

and in illustrated form on wildethinks.com/push-coasts-illustrated.

Creative Commons - Attribution Non-commercial Sharealike 4.0 International ©2015 Vera Katelyn Wilde.

Home Shore

“… the worst thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she cannot reconstitute herself… She becomes irrational not in the sense that she has lost contact with reality but in the sense that she can no longer rationalize—no longer justify herself to herself.”

—Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

“Sting-Bloom”

Gated, sheltered, nook-dwelling darkness.

Then the opening of eyes, thresholds, sky;

uncovering of shoulders and of sun.

Half-spent, recess has finally begun,

this slow dawning of my wan smile,

extension of lung, neck, and hand—

a butterfly glinting sees my welcome,

senses safety, deigns to land.

A moment of shining wings

until its nesting brings

stinging, starting, a jerk back.

Too late, the deed is done,

winged cunt!

Receding into air—

white-hot horizon,

blistering shame,

blooming venom,

flesh opening its petals.

Inviting injury

takes a special grace;

dumbfounded pain,

stumbling, retracting

all my small-ball self

into place.

Enchanted princesses

never curse,

merely faint,

falling heavy,

cannonballs into moats,

quaint

disintegration, ripples still extending out like gentle hands.

“Mommy”

Pencil box, doll shelf, basket on the river—

Climbing out midstream, I myself deliver.

You never did give birth to me.

Birthing is discovery,

and our home a hiding.

Mommy, you have killed yourself.

You never gave yourself a chance,

and hated me for taking mine.

Behind the closed and twice-locked door,

your jealousy too cruel to ignore.

I minded as long as I could,

and I have the scars to prove it—

a buried hatchet breaking across my spine,

marking your white-trash fantasy

of Indian blood. Getting away

from you was the Indian-giver

of my life. I’d gain a state or two,

and your need would take me back,

dumb boomerang, debris returning

to litter the giving-up land left

after the abandoning sea.

Years when I wanted to leave

and you couldn’t dress yourself

or be nice, I drove away and away,

sobbing and screaming into rolled-up windows

before turning around to make dinner.

Before I diagnosed you, when the doctors

and your sister said you were just depressed,

you shut out everyone but me. Silence

was your command, my loyalty.

So we were alone together on Thanksgiving,

never giving thanks. Living with you

when I might have had a family of my own

is how I know I can withstand great pain, need little,

say nothing, and build up force along with fatigue.

Both came crashing down one day,

overturning the basket of my birth

in the rapids of the only love I have left to give you,

which is like my own love that is a mother’s for me—

love that wants nothing

love that wants nothing from me

love that wants only for me a gentle sandfall of shifting lens—

decrescendo, ritardando, rest.

Not the kind of rest where you lay down in peace.

But the kind where all previous notes sum to shifted sense,

minor becomes major, and the whole body blooms waiting for the next note

like a baby waiting warm by her mother, who is not yet jealous

of the desires digesting in her cells, not yet dreaming but growing.

Love that commands, if life doesn’t fit—change it, change it, change it.

“Gold Coast”

Rabid dogs plastering shoulder to toe,

turning to blind knee-bent buoy

the constant whir of catalogue and question—

churning buttercream, painted sky,

the crush and crash of bloody tidal cry.

Suffocation, enforced vacation from light and air.

Glistening sea-foam fills and sits in breath’s empty spaces.

Broken shells tattoo hips, faces—breathless bottom-blanket

a shared thread in the naked spread of quilt and distance.

Rippling and ripped, her mind is that distance.

And so is yours, which is how it’s possible for you to understand,

if only I can be clear in this swirl of muddy water.

Pedestrian-painted quadruped, I have clawed,

in time and the lull of the riptides’ maw, back onto the shore’s softer lap.

Abruni, glittering blood on white a curiosity,

I am numb rocks, rough and tumbling forward.

Pursued and pulled out, the lion of my screams drowned

in the uncaring crowd’s doe eyes. I mean to say,

they didn’t feel like drowning me that day.

I mean to say, no deer was caught that year,

although I searched myself long after the hunt was quit

and the unearned feast depleted. “Abruni, don’t go in the water.

It will take you,” the children laughed, chasing me further in

to tickle my legs with great white spiders.

The men, too, walked by shouting their great concern,

before seeing the blood and recoiling: “Don’t you know

women are afraid of the water?” Women are unafraid,

I mean to say, of unbelonging. Hell is going home.

“Right to Silence”

Silent women carry mace,

walk to parked cars and locked homes

asphalt-eyed, pumping key-clenched fists.

Grey ghosts, we are pleasure boats

painted to disappear, carrying unseen soldiers

of selves to far-off wars.

We have learned to not complain.

We have learned that the world is not ours,

that the world is not ours is our fault.

Silence puffs its feathers, purrs,

and sheds useless old skins.

We have a right to silence.

We have many rights. For example,

we have also a right to compliance.

Miranda’s dull-witted, unwilling lover,

walking home tired from ticket-taking,

was pulled or climbed into a stranger’s car.

Therein: rope, rape, and Miranda.

Before he confessed, before his first conviction climaxed

with overturning, before our rights took his name

in a marriage of supreme respect and sexy gavel ching,

and before his reconviction—

police strapped the ticket-taker

into an interrogation chair and measured

her breathing, fingertip sweat, and the changes

in the spaces between the beatings of her heart.

“Turn on the light inside you, so we can see,”

they commanded. Jane Doe complied.

But her light was dim, seeing as she was retarded,

teenaged, and otherwise Inconclusive.

With that lie detector non-result, the investigation stalled,

which is to say the police did not believe her,

did not believe her story checked out enough to check out,

did not buy Jane’s Doe Rape Plea.

And so the ticket-taker returned to ticket-taking

but couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stop fingertip sweating, couldn’t pull her arms

that had been pulled tight by ropes and wires alike, tight enough over her head

to take the beatings of her heart. Someone had some small mercy:

a male guardian drove her home from work.

Paralysis: she couldn’t walk it anymore,

that familiar route with its breadcrumbs of restraints.

And there, at the bus stop, she imagined seeing again:

Miranda in his car, with the ropes still dangling inside.

Her guardian gave chase. Miranda sped away—

but left the ropes where they lay.

Never know when you’ll need ‘em.

There is no right to remain silent

when you are alone in an elevator

or ignorant with a cop.

There is no lie detector, human or otherwise.

We can’t read each other, can’t find a reflex

that tells what stories are truer, false, or merely faulty.

We have a right to try,

we have a right to try to listen

for the tell of tone or tempo,

and we have a right,

when others are trying,

to remain silent.

“Right to Bear”

I have a right to bear

children—

shiny new ones

all my own,

so new they

don’t yet have

tags sewn to

their inseams, steam

fresh from the

press of flesh,

sinews unworn and

unweary: mine, yours.

I have a right to bear

hardship—

like how I miss you

too much to love you,

and the loss of dreams

that is the prize of living.

I am at liberty to lose

my balance, reel

into myself quite by accident,

and pull my hair behind my ears

while stuttering hello.

I have a right to bear

insecurity—

in the Post Office and dormitory,

in bars and alleyways between

cars and destinations, always the in-between

in which my shoulders stray forward,

my eyes slouch down and around,

and I long for arms—bulky, hairy ones

with hard trigger-pulls and a double-barreled

chest attached, breathing steadily.

I possess the freedom to wish

hard for that chest wherever I go.

Not to be accompanied, but to be

emancipated and manly, unapproachably

fuzzy, and everywhere adored, yet

terrifying in a new way altogether:

clawing for honey, lumbering for trout,

bugging campers out.

I have a right to bear arms.

“What Do Irises Want?”

By the drying sheet-kite sanctuary

where we tucked in sleeping onions

as the dead dogwoods sighed themselves into skeletons,

iris stalks angle now, Bolshoi ballerinas in tiger-stripe tutus,

upturned lips opening in steady relevé to the sky,

purple pigments running bud to sleeve

before some unseen flower tourniquet stops the flow at the hip,

lace sleeves crumpling with the crush of wind

and hit of the occasional gripless squirrel let rip.

What do irises want? They’ll bloom themselves

to death like this, reeking of spearmint and myrrh,

forking and opening in a whir of color and unexpected mint.

They try and fail, and do not really try,

to hold some beauty back a while.

But irises want only to burst, beguile, and be gone.

Their pretty heads bob, wave, and tremble with the grasses,

open to all buzzing suitors, leaving modesty and morasses

for flowers that ask more questions, linger longer.

What do irises want if not to drink deeply of spring,

no matter the cost? Drinking is its own reason—

everyone has had that season, or seen it pass.

Xiaca speeds time, and tonic cuts the bite of past made present.

Everyone moves with more rhythm and poetry

in loosened limbs, or so imagines.

That easy bloom is another highway to death:

in every leaching of power, a little powerlessness.

What do margaritas want?

Sometimes they want the lime, sir,

and sometimes, ma’am, the salt—

but it’s the same fix every time, dual malt.

The payoff is a different rhyme,

the new thirst of a different day,

the piper of habit demanding his pay.

Once upon a springtime, when a season of terror broke my habit of kindness,

I learned a new dance. In my stall, in the belly of the house where grains

break across walls like sand hurtling under waves, and sweet tobacco

paints the air with lead, I tilted to catch the right wind,

time bleeding while I breathed, my arms blooming slowly

from fifth position down into third, nannying a pitter-patter

of little shell casings, bells plinging in the background

like so many falling acorns dropping in the wiry crosshairs of frost.

The double action of my silver talisman was cock and fire,

was deter and avoid, not accost

was a double shot into darkness

was you can go anywhere and live, but

do you want to live like that?

What do guns want? In my dream of a life

I want to live, guns want to be dancers—

to have that fluid power of the flesh,

the same power that causes such weakness.

No cocktail has quite the kick

of resolution as a shotgun’s,

but I think they want that, too—

the smoother finish of rum and blue,

the afterglow of embrace when they’re through.

“Vet”

You said, “I’ve been lonely in all this time, too”

and it tanked me, thinking of me thinking of myself.

I thought of you covered in lonely time,

hit by enemy marriage, armored children,

improvised explosive parents and worse—

coming in shaky from the time, dripping with time,

tracking dirt and years of lying on the good carpet,

smearing stolen seconds along faucets and in sinks.

You deserve a purple heart for the battles

you’ve avoided on behalf of others,

for keeping the peace that didn’t hold in the end,

for taking the flak of my love

all those years like a selfless soldier.

“The Shadow”

Peace has consequences.

All reactions neutralized,

no anger and no shame.

The equal reaction:

no flooding of the brain.

No intended imposition

of offense or pain.

The opposite:

you don’t want to be there

when the dam blows.

In the darkness,

water grows.

“Safety”

Ungrateful, hateful criminal on the corner of the coffeepot and the counter:

What are you carrying, where are you going, do you possess the contraband

of forbidden dreams or other drugs and weapons? You don’t mind, do you,

if I search you with the fading light in my eyes, my arthritic hands, and this

two-headed dog you will inherit if you just hold still a little longer?

Come along to wall, to the ground—I’m going there anyway, I’ll help you.

Do not think I want anything other than to keep you safe,

like a hydraulic dam keeps a city safe from flooding and powerlessness,

all the shutting-up of all that force and flowing

serving the greater good, and the sun still shining

on the still and silent water.

“Feral People Overrun the Town like Hungry Cats”

Watching a white long-tailed cat carry low and swift,

wind and rain caressing green-born buds and leaf-fed grasses,

I wondered when the last time was I felt such peace.

It was an armadillo, a pale baby, searching like a raccoon

and rifling like a piglet. It must have been before Texas.

Lone Star sun’s hot and heavy weight slipped a disc of cloud,

and the trigger pull of afternoon thunder went off hard and loud.

Ghosts visited in a dizzying whir of hands—world rift,

cosmic hammer falling when I prayed for release.

Hope exploded slowly, expanding gasses

of dreams drifting like cactus burs from dune to dusty dune.

It drove west without me, leaving neither note nor nexus.

Many a cry in the night, many a poured-out moon—

natural rights like guns went off at high noon,

blued alloys one with blue hands, drift

of butt into back cold but warming. Comfort in the crease,

the quickening press of melting leather holster into tired flesh—

a flickering lantern in the darkest night, a power plexus.

So I kept them loaded, carried my rights where I wanted, masses

bulging beneath baggy shirts, guarding my foreshortened lease.

The armadillo scurries away suddenly now, as if cowed

by the end of the road it crossed. The chicken gives short shrift

to the reasons for its crossings, but the armadillo tilts its head afresh

from the edge, as if asking itself whether it should turn around, press on, or cease.

He scratches in the dust now as the vultures preen and croon,

checking the earth’s armor to see how it matches up with his own, platoon

of shadows and briars coming to the ground’s defense. The vultures

are imagining pure freedom, a state of more rights and less order,

a place where feral people overrun the town like hungry cats, proud

backs arching, right stoking smoking right—and under the bloody moon,

the broken-bough wolf lifting up her downy head, unbowed.

“But We Should Take No Souvenirs”

“If thou couldst empty all thyself of self,

Like to a shell disinhabited,

Then might He find thee on the Ocean shelf…”

—T.E. Brown, “Indwelling”

I want someone to find me

isn’t this a dumb fantasy

and pulling my rough edges

out of the sand

hurriedly

as if worried for the tide and gulls

worried someone else will first

worried I am lonely for touch

empty and sand-covered though I am

I want someone to pick me up

and hold me in the warm spoon of the palm

brush me off and look at the brushstrokes

of the canyons and ridges rippling out

from my opened spine

running kind fingers up and down it

thinking not

where is the other half

what lived here once

should I throw it back where it came from

but ah, this is mine

this is complete

this is one to keep

“A Recipe for Melting It Down”

Melting it down

is easy to do

on the stovetop.

Better if you have gas,

but most electric and flattops

still are controllable

and, more important, open—

unlike microwaves—

for stirring to ensure

even cooking and prevent scorching,

and for ventilating smoke

in the likely event

of open flame.

Melting it down

is harder to do

over a campfire

when you are in the woods

hoping to God

you find your calling

in a flash of moonrise and smoke,

or at least kick the habit

of self-destruction

through breathing and playing with leaves.

Melting it down

feels damn near impossible

in a car, particularly if you are living in it.

Pawn artists smell desperation.

But everything is possible

when you are living in a car,

like being mentioned later

in an inspirational story

that is not an obituary.

Here is how you do it,

wherever you are.

Listen, stop crying, breathe—

I’m drawing you a map,

what is a recipe but that?

Gather all your precious

metals and jewels—

family silver, gold soul, citrine scotch,

silver chloride electrodes from the medical tribe,

wedding bands from other people

who believed in such things

for reasons other than health insurance.

Other valuables, too—musical instruments

you’re not going to play again

because you’d just as soon

not make another sound.

Swiss Army knives

and all pretention of neutrality.

The Smith & Wesson you slept with

in place of the first husband,

almost-husband if you must know,

for half a year.

Take out a large saucepan.

Preheat with 450° of despair.

Preseason with sweat.

Bruise expectations

and pile into saucepan.

Simmer until walls are melted down.

Stir until just kidding, keep stirring

so expectations do not stick.

Things we thought we knew about ourselves

may float to the top. Separate them out

with bones after boiling for broth.

The pots and cinderblocks

are finally one now, and in the fading light

of sun, fire, and other performances,

I’m more and more certain

that somewhere here

is something we can use.

“All the World’s a Set”

Someone, please give me a line!

I don’t know what to do with my hands or feet.

I don’t know who to talk to.

I want to be a real boy, find

that I want something—but something’s in my way.

I want to have something, anything to say.

But the truth is, I know my place.

I’m an extra. Nobody knows my face,

least of all myself.

It’s not like being a Nobody—

then, you can find other Nobodies, too.

Nobodies become Somebodies

in the fact of their pathetic, universal mew.

It’s like I see your body

in the mirror where mine should be.

I have to report to costume and go on outside.

But it feels like a lie, feels like it would be

more honest to stay off-camera and hide,

although that’s not what extras are for.

We’re just here to make the scene look a bit more

like no one is watching, so somebody will.

So much presence to carry a story over the sill

of Somebody’s mind.

But look. Today, I am beautiful again.

What was fat now looks thin.

The body has tricks to hide the self from predators:

kaleidoscope skin, bluetail dissections.

The brain has tricks to hide the praying self from the self of prey:

the chameleon body, a stranger in the mirror every day.

Hush, you don’t need a line.

She might startle. Easy.

She won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt her.

Be kind, move slowly, forget who you think you were.

Beyond the judgment of accusing eyes, flexions.

Behind the hideous torso, shoulder blades like little wings.

The slow sound of a small whir.

Her limbs moving like living things.

New Coasts

“Yet an experiment, were you to try it, could free you from your cavil, and the source
of your arts’ course springs from experiment.”

—Beatrice to Dante, The Divine Comedy

“Visiting Paris in a Blizzard”

Descending cloud-bundled skies at dawn,

our plane navigates a vein of snow

snaking cold where it wants to go.

We beat dawn to the sleeping city.

Slowly, the indigo Fibonacci trees wizen—

this is not just any Sunday, bon,

but a day Parisians visit Paris too, a laughing flow

of sledding children flooding Montmartre, Parc de Sceaux.

We shared a bouquet of macarons and rose petal tea.

Your body was a quiet and soft storm that sighs on

inside me, melting snowdrifts into roaring rivers whereupon

I float with my eyes closed in smile, the slow, thorough

spread of thaw painful at first—shock, tingle, hello.

Eight years ago, a piano student’s father asked me

to bring his boy home. My car was a flimsy mizen

trailing masts of staccato darkness and horizontal rain, denouement

of some glorious cacophony I can’t remember now although

I remember so exactly how the road disappeared in rain, aglow

with my headlights, and how he said: “It looks like we’re going up and on,

into space.” White-knuckled and working to keep on course but show

all was well, I smiled: “Yes, and the other cars’ lights glow

like shooting stars.” Quiet in the backseat as I worried he might know

how very afraid I was of wrecking him in some planetary ditch with me.

“You paint a lot of flowers,” he broke his quiet with a yawn.

“You should paint the night sky, these stars of cars, the raining on.”

“Night in Flagstaff”

We spun in glowing from the moon-bent whir of a missed exit,

our mesa-dusty hands shaking from tumbleweed storms

and the dull hunger of the long road.

Even in darkness, the pines were friendly priests—

spare men, heaven-stretching, bony and wifeless.

Layers of them lined the mountain ridges,

a green mass breathing blue-smoke shivers in prayer,

whispering admiration of star-bangles set out

against the falling clavicle of horizon, and then—

the flickering blue flames of its slow inhale,

until the tallest pine pierced it at last in the morning,

soft hail unburdening the sun of its brightness,

releasing the stretched spines of the hungry pines,

meeting the earth at its highest and lowest.

The earth held still meeting the sky.

But if it could have moved,

it would have gotten bigger,

vibrating up into and around the hail.

The pine men were hungry still

and the ground beginning to freeze

when we drove away.

“California Morning Sky”

Some secret, silent stealing starts

above the clouds and currents of coffee.

Spokes of it gradually break through, uninvited.

A sudden move, a journey, a turning of the world—

and the whole horizon’s washed of white,

as if that warm thief of shining light spun out a scare,

put color back in the face of all being and its hope for the future.

Mockingbird sings, shimmy shimmy shimmy!

and I know a neighbor watches cable-soft porn.

The bullfrog up the hill bleats Elaine, Line 7,

as bullhorns croak numbers, names.

Mockingbird answers their calls: brring! brring!

Darkness, and there is no music now.

But to say there is no music here is not to listen.

First—cars, occasionally shifting gears or clanking within.

Mostly slapping hand on back of the road that wraps around,

until the sun and drivers are mostly home.

Then, trees talking amongst themselves,

bugs singing out in the quiet shelves of leaves and tires,

singing to themselves as the sun goes in and out of its cloud corner.

With that, the country hugs its shoulders, compressed in a shiver.

I’m back East suddenly, and there is the train.

On frequent occasion and with no timing that is yet my own,

the running begins until steaming and clanging of hardware

like dishes in the sink is closer.

It lifts and unfolds time ‘til I return

to a moment that was but never was—

in Cook Springs, wise old people all around,

sweet tea and tobacco smoke inside and out,

the dog asking for a sip, and so many trees and smiles—

when the steaming and clanging was also present,

on frequent occasion and with no timing that was yet my own.

I’m still waiting for the pain to come,

camping here on my springy studio apartment floor,

building coded for bounce when the world shakes.

Occasionally it breaks past my stone-still guard owl

on the apartment building across the street—

the shifting of plates, past into present,

tiny tremors marking the new coast, year, person

with old scars of anniversaries, holidays, conversations

riddling time that will grow newer yet with time.

Camping when I was older meant:

warmth of sunlight on cold, bare skin,

enforced rest of wooded slumber far from people,

and above all the kind of silence that lets you hear the world—

birds, bugs, frogs, branches, leaves, footsteps of deer,

my own heartbeat in step.

How hard I tried to slow my thoughts

in babbling brooks with woods-hauled books,

a cigarette to right the rhythm of breathing,

a fire to forge myself to myself,

and nights alone in woods with only a nod

to the occasional, passing men.

There is less effort now in everything good.

The kinder chorus—talismen and boys I spun

between scared fingers, animal spirits

leaping out of Lethe to make me laugh,

small gods warming the wind enough

for frozen feet to last the night—

you said it would get better.

I never could believe it would.

You who are not yet that you

of reassuring others who wander

and may very well be lost—

I want to draw you a map

for making it from one set of woods to the next,

write a recipe for boiling bones to broth.

But all I can do is tell you where I’ve traveled.

The long, black tunnel in which I was tired of living

Has let out into a calm and sunny sideroad.

I’m only camping in the middle of the valley,

but I’ve seen the old lady on the tree-covered hilltop,

in her cave of flowers and magical, hybrid creatures—

the poetess-Rottweiler guarding a ballerina scarecrow.

The wind doesn’t rustle leaves because it sounds good.

The cicadas aren’t playing back to pick the prettiest chord.

The train isn’t choosing tracks based on their tenor.

Birds, though—true enough, they pick what they like best

From all the songs around. But still their calls are saying

only what they have, and what they need.

“Three Roads Diverged”

Three roads diverged, or maybe they were only threads unspooling

as the plane ascended above the city of my life.

Not jumbled but crossing, interlocking, peach-hungry but Prufrocking,

traffic stuttering from low altitude before distance let it pour,

light-river headlights streaming Christmas in the falling darkness.

(But does darkness fall when you’re rising into it?

When you meet it, coming or going, its hand touching

the shoulder of your wings like an old friend on the street?

Or is it instead a fellow-traveler, no cloak but a companion?)

Oh, I could tell you one of the roads was red,

but no one wants to hear about my raw and throbbing heart.

You have one, too. It’s not a special thing, except—

yours is yours, and mine is mine.

Of course one is green—I’m young enough for that now,

the irrigation of time, distance, and sun

having resurrected the tired, crumbling dirt,

flooding the dry riverbeds of resigned desires.

The blue road looks from here like a vase

aching for flowers and gaze,

but the vase is in motion as if it has been thrown,

the arc of it stretching into the receding horizon.

Having flown now more than once in ten years,

I’m waiting for the moment of cloud cover that brings clarity,

the settling into enclosure on a fixed path, boxed freedom of flight,

the falling away of these divergences and unspoolings

into the soft arms of night, speed, and departure.

(The night is so great from the air, the embrace of it tighter,

as if it lives in the sky, higher than ordinary darkness,

and when I visit it’s so glad for my company,

although I’ve walked with it on every road.)

“Your Daughter’s Voice”

Your daughter’s voice: a mouse, a wall that wraps itself around

and against you, and a knife-drawer into which you reach, withdraw.

She searches for cheese with silences and you dole out small,

serrated bits. Your daughter’s voice: a mouse, a wall.

Last month she cut herself, her slow crawl away from the edge a blur

of effort and exhaustion. The knife-drawer still holds her in thrall,

gleaming with her eyes’ lost brightness, holding her in the holey shawl

of reclaimed power. Your daughter’s voice: a mouse, a wall

that builds in pebbles, separates but disappears in places, barely high enough

to bounce a ball, powerless to forestall the overtures of weeds and boys,

overgrowing her now as if she were not a squall gathering force to burst onto

her own shore. Your daughter’s voice: a mouse, a wall, a warning to us all.

“Ok, Then”

You are gone. Ok, then.

You did not leave the morning after packing

in the night, when I wouldn’t fight.

You did not love in the morning after packing

in the night, when I couldn’t answer,

didn’t have words for your “Why do you care?”

There is a palm tree growing

in my new bathtub

but we are waiting to see what happens.

The heart-shaped scab

that tattooed my ring finger for ages

is almost completely grown out.

You’d put another decoration there,

but I don’t want it, don’t know

why I don’t like kissing you anymore,

your face a strange bird in my face.

Ok, then, maybe I don’t like kissing.

There is a matchmaker floating

outside my balcony

but we are waiting to see what happens.

But look, you named me.

No one else could,

no one else would want to.

My parents did it wrong—

I don’t blame them.

They didn’t know me.

Only you have known me

well enough to name me.

Ok, then. That will never

in either of our lifetimes

happen again.

There is a vat of holy water

boiling on my stove

but we are waiting to see what happens.

The widowed waxess

who touches me

with gentle purpose

says I should go to the beach

every day, she would go to the beach

every day if she had my body.

Ok, then. You should join a dating site,

I tell her, offering to make

an account, it’s free, let’s do it now.

Maybe in a few years, she says,

when I’m ready.

When I buy a black bikini

and go to the beach? I say.

There is a seagull tapping

on her office window

but we are waiting to see what happens.

It doesn’t hurt.

Sometimes I’m hurt

and don’t know it.

Once I burned myself

with a cigarette

and didn’t know it until I itched

and looked down from the road

at my jeans, freshly polka-dotted

with fire and ash. Ok, then.

There is a fire

in my new shoes

but I am waiting to see what happens.

We went to the beach

in the bikini that’s as old now

as I was when we met.

A greeting squadron of

leaping dolphins walked with us

and I could smell the salt,

could feel the sun’s warmth

in ways I had forgotten,

been numb to,

felt only the pain of missing

the ability to feel.

Ok, then. The cold at last has cleared

from my nose, from my skin.

There is a tornado spinning out

from the warmth of this joy

and the cold of my fear

that I will see my father here—

the tragic hero returns, tolerably disguised,

home to the city she never knew.

Is unrecognized for her own good,

and chaos ensues as we knew it would—

but we are waiting to see what happens.

You gave me

what I think must be

the happiest moment of my life,

the day I came home

from another man’s arms

and you had decided you loved me.

I was afraid you were going to kill me,

the love in your face hot and closed

the love in your face familiar and strange

the love in your face a gust of gale

picking up my umbrella

and me with it,

carrying me a small distance up and away

but not too far.

Ok, then. Storms end.

But we are waiting to see what happens.

“Nerves Before Our First Date”

Oh, I have to build in time to buy her flowers.

And oh, I have to wear jeans if I do that, or it will be too much.

And oh, I want to buy her flowers and wear the black slip dress

with the tricolor scarf knotted around my waist,

and oh, I want to slip off the scarf-belt in the bar

and oh, slip it around her waist

to lead her into me, oh,

to lead her home, oh,

and oh, I want to draw it up through her center

until she cries it out her mouth—

Oh! like a bright, white dove

waking up on a surprised magician’s hatrim,

not hopping but flying.

“Night Picnic”

The beach at night is bright with half-light, moonlit sand dunes

waving to winking stars—fires stilled in a balance of pushing and pulling winds—

and the sparkling smiles of the black and blue crashing waves.

We add our tealights, flickering behind the folded wings of our clothed torsos

and wave-wet legs, spilling hot wax all over the towel in a fit of wind and tumbling.

The night’s brightness licks up, high with the oxygen hit of your laughter.

We roll up tealights, tealeaves, waxy blanket, sopping cuffs,

and swim out in the blue-green ocean of my bed, farther and farther.

How are we going to get back? we ask one another, soaking and spent.

We’re days at sea before we realize time lies down here,

spreads herself like a happy cat across the entire sea

where you stretch out into me.

Paw in paw, we lay together in her silver light.

Diving into darkness, we grow unbearably bright.

Pulsing now, gently lapping, not sleeping—only napping.

“Witch-Sister”

Her bright, tight angle from cheekbone to chin draws me in,

and she is going to burn the house down;

her green eyes glitter with leaping dolphins, wet skin,

and her iridescent darkness glows so hot, I can’t tell if her hair is black or brown.

Her shoulders cage a spine so big it bursts the bubble of her gentle frame;

I want to stretch a thousand canvasses in the moonlight on those boards.

Her tongue is a pool of gasoline pouring on my body’s open flame,

and her voice is a set of doves plucking strange and secret chords.

Her hands turn kindling to fire and flames to sin.

We float, happy duckies, rather than sink and drown.

Wherever she’s out, I don’t want to be in.

And she is going to burn the house down.

“Spinning Fire”

When we are spinning fire,

your body is awash in moving brushstrokes

and your dance is a sun on water that never tires,

sparkling with heat and flowing with current spokes.

Although you’re barely moving,

every muscle knows its path—

every flicker of a hip grooving

gently in place like a storm’s studied wrath.

And I think you must be in place, too.

Your body sings a song of home and belonging.

Is my quietness some clue?

I worry the rosary beads of my heart with some longing.

The reason I drop the hoop, the little girl who looks

just like you says, is because I try.

Hold still and let it whirl! She laughs. The nooks

and rings of my planetary body whirl and wobble by.

Kick wheels are easier than this to spin.

Aggression carries a currency with mud and blame

it lacks with fire and air. You can’t win

when you’re playing the wrong game.

Spinning yarn from tangles takes smaller motions, too,

than the planets and my hands can give.

I want to learn that gentleness, to renew

what’s tattered and harsh, weave a life I can live.

I went back to school to see if I could learn

more about spinning fire and yarn, and earn

the right to move so freely and tell a story so true

that it would singe off the quiet between my heart and you.

The professor stood at the board and smiled at the class,

noticed we were falling asleep after an hour and a half.

He said: “We can’t comprehend things that are too large or too small.

It’s only through symbols that we get a grip at all.”

And he swirled his coffee gently like a firey hoop.

“George Washington’s in my mug, in a molecule group

of six million bits of water and carbon, and each of us, too—

even as we live and breathe, we fly apart and I drink in each of you.”

Spinning fire doesn’t know what it’s about,

although flames always rise up and out.

The dance comes from hungering for the oxygen all around,

despite gravity drawing hoop and hips down.

“Listening Sound”

My breath is a simple refrain

I sing to myself,

the breeze on my face

and sun on my whole, bare body

a song the world sings back.

My body has so much to say to your body.

Words jumble over my skin

when I imagine your touch,

my arching back and neck tilting into

and away from where your lips might be.

But it loves listening best.

My hips have a prayer

for you to murmur on your knees.

They are a narrow stone column,

my torso a rocky cliff,

the bones of my being a pretty set of boulders—

sharp here and smooth there,

and mostly rounded out by the animal softness stalking them,

like women’s bodies are,

no matter how small.

It’s a rocky shore

and I know you know better than to dock there.

Anyway, great ships are not built to stay in port.

Honey, I know you ain’t gonna stay.

You may navigate through the rocks to the sound

that rocks gently, more or less, longing to listen

to what your body has to say.

“Getting Out the Demon Box”

The box’s cold presses in from a foot away.

We regard each other a while, wondering what to say.

I run my hand up my dress, finger the fuse, ignite –

And in my light the box seems now to glow.

With stupid fingers, I undo the lock below its golden latch,

nurse its rattling with my thumb until together we lift the hatch.

Relief: it sticks a moment as if painted shut.

But then gives way to bursting smoke and dust.

I dump it in a rush as if to contain

what I’m unleashing here again.

In the new light, with the old, blue smoke cleared,

these demons look small and frail. We neared

oblivion together, before I locked them in this trunk

of wood, paint, and pretending. I meant to burn it.

I don’t know why I waited—intuition or funk.

A sleepless year, braced and listening for hoofbeats, drums, war.

After a time, when the world did not end and the door

had stayed closed until it seemed safe,

I resolved to brave their strafe.

Time, distance, the magic of running away?

Something turned my demons into hay.

They’ll never be gold, I know that by now.

What I want to know is how

they seemed so big, mean, and loud

when all along they were small, sad, and cold.

All stories seem like noise until they can be told.

“Push Coast”

When I flew to Paris to meet another man,

I joined a techno party in the Detroit airport basement,

full of flashing lights and pulsing beat

It was marked, it was art, everyone knew.

I’m less sure they knew about the zoo

on the top floor, where trapped birds

flit like brown streamers, chirping from spoke to spoke

of ceiling-spangling supports.

Sometimes we’re blind to the prisoners around us.

Everyone has heard the story. It’s that kind of era.

It happens at one airport or border checkpoint or another

every other week, but this was mine.

Unattended baggage drew heavy security in my heart.

Fields of cloud, fighter-plane-plowed,

blew me and my past apart.

It took you long enough, but you did it.

You helped me up, dragged me out of the fire, held my hand in Oslo,

and listened when I insisted there were voices.

There were. There was unmarked airport art—

a whisper directly from a hidden speaker to me saying:

“You are invaluable. You are life. You are freedom,”

and I cried with wanting to believe.

You didn’t hear it til I made you listen.

Sometimes I’m deaf, too, or the lines are weighed down.

Our connection has been iffy for months.

Wifi is especially spotty when you’re in Copenhagen,

so I say, “You’re breaking up.”

“No, we’re breaking up,” you say.

You think it’s the legacy

of the long loneliness I lay in,

that I can’t forgive you that,

can’t wait now any longer

for something warm and kind.

I think it’s the sudden realization

of the sky, a window opened, a cry and rush of wings.

Before I knew what was happening,

the sun was so much brighter and closer

than neon lights and reflecting glass could come.

That’s the story people expect, anyway.

But then I missed the familiar bones of the cage.

The white and blue of the pristine beach,

endless stretches of clear skies,

luring sailors toward rocks—

everything got old.

We hitched a ride, a few Sirens out of water,

to a new, old coast, giving up our tails, our feathers,

even the part of the voice that shattered across waves

in perfect gemtones, and the part that feeds on that shattering.

Then we pushed off,

pushed back and gone to the next coast,

although we felt ourselves inadequate to the migration—

our GPS signal had been lost; we did not even have an address.

We went because warmth,

because bodies know where to go,

because when trying melted the wax off our wings

and we began falling, still telling ourselves and each other

that we might be flying—

the ocean glittered, held out its arms, broke the trust-fall of our try,

and we were not so childish as to believe all would be well,

we could see ourselves and we were puny, we were small.

But we were human enough also to try and try again.

This still isn’t right.

You lay in a long loneliness, too.

You need me to honor this;

you’re angry that instead I remember first how,

once or twice, your hands that held me

once or twice a week for a decade

shattered the wineglass of my face drunk in your grip.

And yet you are a cloud, a sun, a poem

stretching your rays verse by verse across my sky.

You’ve never hurt me save I’ve hurt myself,

but maybe there I am, doing it again.

Whatever is right, this much is true for now:

I’ve sent the children who never were and never will be off to an Aunt—

Maya Angelou who has whiskey with me on Sundays,

or Oscar Wilde whose name I stole for them.

I’ve packed again and soon enough, I’ll load the wagon we brought west.

I’ll cover up the crushed grapes of my lips

with gray leaves of Midwestern grass in the great stretches of open space

between one push coast and the next.

I’ll sleep alone under big skies and they’ll pour their stretch into me.

The sun and earth will stain me with their beauty.

I’ll feel a deeper sadness than crying, a helplessness before hope.

I’ll grow too large for what I’ve been and done, and been done.

I’m getting out of an abusive relationship with myself.

There is no shelter where I can crouch while I get on my feet.

I wish you could join me, but you can’t come on this trip.

I hope to see you again soon, when the sky is just as blue,

when the stretch of road has pulsed across the country and my life

one more time, if I am lucky, and I feel sure enough of my escape to rest

with and on you. We could have, after the only revolution I can make,

a true marriage. But you have to make your own revolution, too.

Back and Gone

“darkness is your country... where the future is... live there not as prisoners... but as natives... Do your work there... in the earth we have looked down upon...

in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls. ”

—Ursula K. LeGuin, “A Left-Handed Commencement Address”

“Hiking the Hermit Trail, Grand Canyon National Park”

“Given enough time, nothing is more changeable than rock.”–Enos Mills

Under a different name that was finally mine, I fled the terror of defeat

and journeyed to where my father the king lived.

He would not have recognized me without his name.

His kingdom of sunshine and sin was bright and beautiful.

Relief fell on me like a sphinx mistaken for a guard.

I never wanted to leave, although small pains hit out at me everywhere—

a baby’s cry in the grocery store was a grenade.

I never could orient to where the sun would rise in his city of lost angels

and ever-blooming flowers in the desert. But at least I began again there

to have faith that it would. I never wanted to leave, but who can pass up

the chance to leave the leaver and begin again, again?

Couldn’t find my way out of my own neighborhood with two GPS toys running.

That’s flight. The system-crashing wing-bashing pull of it. Exhaustion.

So I took a nap and left at 3 a.m. instead of midnight, after locking myself out

a few times and finally stalking around the empty-cage apartment like a wild animal

before a storm, too tired and wired to decide if I wanted to let sleep take me alive.

Last time I drove it, the country was not yet mine,

but the Turner notches of blasted highway rockwalls

were a carwash for the soul, stripping away scabs of past, airing the wounds.

This time I’m blowing the notches kisses. What I tumbled through roughly

on the way out West feels now so gentle, smiling rockfaces waving me on

along the openest damn road I’ve ever seen. Black-eyed Susans rise up

like dancing snakes, and I’ve left or tried to leave so many people, places, and things

without ever achieving this escape velocity that shakes my muscles free from fear.

Everyone says the Grand Canyon is a wonder of the world, but no one tells you

how much it looks like an ocean. I wanted to go swimming

in those slow-crushed rock-waves—but not to dive.

I wanted to talk with the shining, black crow who followed me

from east to west coast, and then returned with me—

who perched in the palm tree outside my window as I rested on the push coast,

and then camped with me again on Desert View.

I wanted to make a fire, but the twigs and branches were damp still from the sobbing.

So I lit a paper bag, and it burned

first like a glittering wreath, like a writhing snake, and like glistening fish scales—

then like bugs running down a log, like cells dancing in a dish—

and finally, like embers, like a still-warm body

tossing its last embraces overboard into a freezing sea.

Fireflies! stars! oh, people, families and their lights and music.

The wind whipped through rock waves and the Colorado River below.

In the morning, I walked and read about the ocean, how Vishnu basement rocks

denote the layer after which nothing can cut the ground anymore.

Rock bottom isn’t really rock bottom, isn’t the worst,

because you can’t go any lower. At last, you can only change—

and rock does, evolving new colors, types, depths, shapes, and patterns.

It’s not a barren bowl, you know.

Trees, flowers, and animals pulse through the Canyon

like old rivers, like new blood, and like moving brushstrokes.

Something harsh carved out something beautiful here.

Ages of shifting, weight, jolting, and gradual wearing-down

made something wonderful—a wonder of the world.

In some places, the stacked cliff-faces look like pyramids—

but no slaves built here. The rock ocean flows from itself.

A museum placard warns, “No rock is safe”—even pure water

traces the verses and faces of its paths over time, grain by softened grain.

Plant roots befriend the cliff-faces for their friction and little but enough food.

Freezing rain stays the night, and cold rock knees fall away and apart.

Softer rocks wash away faster; the stronger stuff stays, stoney-faced,

until its overhang collapses. Being strong doesn’t work out so well, except

it’s still alright, the collapse is beautiful, and anyway even the wonders of the world

are always changing—even rock, especially rock. The only constant is its absurdity:

the river in the desert, the rocks uplifted a mile high by some unremembered crash of plates and godly fists, the carving of an ocean out of rock

changed not damaged by blow after ongoing blow.

It’s hard, it’s impossible, it’s the easiest thing in the world,

for rocks to keep changing. So much easier than refusing to give.

So much easier to pick up and live.

“Watching Wildlife in the Grand Canyon National Park”

Not homeless but without house, home, or family,

I thought I’d go out into the woods and find peace being alone.

Having only camped in relative wilderness or with roving bands of fire-spinners,

I didn’t realize how different national parks would be.

At the Red line stop around the South Rim, a lion waiting just ahead

with three blonde cubs insisted I sit with his kin on the shaded bench

while he stood, taking the sun’s pounding. He quizzed them on their favorite everything—princess, place to shop, pool they’d swum in, earlobe (—“left”—“why?”).

When the smallest cubs starting slapping and yapping, lion and lioness united

with the simple peacemakers’ dictate: “Stop and move on.”

When I exclaimed what great parents they were being, they laughed and said

I caught them at the best two minutes. But they beamed, and I turned away

to search the far horizon for antelope, hoping no one would see me cry.

On the next bus, an Indian girl and an Okie peeked-a-boo through bars

atop the bus seat between them. When Miss India debarked, the remainder turned to me, grabbing my shoulder and laughing, holding my hand, giddy as I counted her fingers, her most basic instinct not to eat, sleep, fight, flight, or fuck, but touch.

On the next bus again, another pack surrounded me,

the females of the species watching from behind while the males played fight in front.

The adult male kept batting the offspring’s bright blue ballcap,

before stealing it and grinning as his cub cracked up punching his paunch.

How do you know when touch is kind, even punches?

I think you have to feel it, just like you can’t reason out why if you have no place,

the world is yours, these magical lands that we own, and them us—

talking lions, dancing wildflowers, bus drivers, small children, and tourists all.

And what’s more, they want you as you are, as you have always been,

and as you might be—with all your grace drawn up and out

by all this beauty, love, and space.

“Briefly in the Promised Land”

The second night camping at the Grand Canyon, the sound of wind

in rock-ocean below is indistinguishable from the crash and roar of a real ocean. Lightening wakes me twice, the second time long enough to realize what it is,

to keep coming, to be beautiful. The feel of sleeping on the ground is like floating

in an ocean that holds you up so strongly you have no feel of falling,

only of being held and pulled down at once by something huge—

a loving woman, a great lake of love, and a softer body than any that could pierce.

Naturally then from there to Zion. Zion is a woman:

towering rock breasts, rusty rock sex, and mud-rushing river named wishfully—

Court of the Patriarchs, Hidden Canyon, Virgin River—

by men who wanted sanctuary so bad they crawled inside

the womb of the west with five wives and died.

She has her own wonders worth it, too,

hanging gardens suspended cliff-side,

rock-colors bursting white-orange-red, mountains circling overhead

like a mobile, like a vulture, and like a mother.

Neither mother nor child, I’m rusty like the mountains.

Rusty with the blood of being a woman,

marked by force, threat, the derogation of bargaining for what is mine

that you cannot buy, the defeats of insisting on humanity

when the necessity of insistence is its own denial.

Neither young nor old, I’m rusty in showing myself naked to the world,

or those in it who could see me if I could let them,

and might even show themselves to me in turn.

Neither temple nor priest, I’m rusty

with women, with myself, and with trusting that I can know either of us,

that I can be real as sacred rock—and as protected.

The road from Zion to Arches hugs me warmly next, hills rising up around my car

like an ocean, rising up in waves of yellow, green, brown, and distant blue,

as white sun arms of sky and road encircle my waist, resting on the small

of my back, caressing my head and face,

reminding me rock breaks, changes, requires care.

Do you think Zion remains just because she’s beautiful?

The temple of eternity itself required bureaucracy to survive civilization.

“Riding Storms”

Colorado turned lush suddenly—river shimmering, evergreens shimmying,

skinny with speed, closer to the sky, thinner from absorbing Aspen, wealth, and fashion. Riding storms through San Isabel and my next two campsites,

I came to Kansas doubly early. The wind and rain smashed it into Eastern Colorado—

all windmills, wheat fields, and dark clouds. I had to hug myself to walk laps

around the gas station, and even then couldn’t achieve a straight line.

Clouds and shining rainbows beamed down from above and up from below,

off the gleaming, wet road. The flatness bent the road like a rainbow,

the fields running like a wet-painted globe, their color dripping

off the edge of the world on both sides. When signal held,

the radio warned of flash flooding as far as the state could see.

So I let the driving demon have her way, riled and raring,

riding storms straight through. The road through rain reduced to the yellow brick bits

of the dotted line that matters, and I followed them without stopping.

Cowardly lions, motorcycles crouched for shelter beneath overpasses.

At the Kansas Welcome Center, impossibly flatter still, a floor mosaic sealed

the promise of free coffee after rain: “Ad Astra Per Aspera.”

In the store-side garage, a middle-aged couple rocked their fields to sleep,

needling empty passers-by for promises of pictures of anywhere else.

In the grass outside where I watered invisible flowers with undrinkable coffee,

a shed snakeskin lay intact. Some changes are that sudden.

There are places in this country where the ground is so beautiful,

I could kneel down and kiss it, and have.

There are places in this country that have broken me, but that’s shed.

Freedom. I have driven you away for good—

you my demons, you my family, you my past.

I’m a wildcat kneading the steering wheel like a cub, like a lover,

and like a Midwestern rock-wall climbing the moving road-sky.

You will look for me and find nothing but dust sparkling in the sun I ate,

swallowed with miles and mountains. It’s over.

Sometimes, I worry even glancing over my shoulder is ungrateful,

is a way to break the magic of the road, lose salvation, fall back

into the old world of pain.

It must have been the storm and my fatigue that wired me

to push forward and not say where to when the man at the neighboring pump

asked twice, guessed. Even when I realized the next city was a plain

populated by a synchronized herd of windmills polka-dotting deserted night,

I didn’t want to talk to him. Nor to the well-meaning father at the Motel 6

where I landed when I could fly no farther, after riding storms

from Moab to Salina, shaky tired and unanswering

when he asked if I’d come from west before saying he knew I had,

we kept passing each other; asked if I was alone before saying

he told his kids to put their chair up against the door for extra safety

in places like this. I smiled, nodded, and walked away.

No, I didn’t do it.

Do you know, too? You placeless and afraid with reason?

That this is our world too.

If we bluff.

If we let the sky grow us.

If we go outside and try.

“Pitching Camp in the Ozarks”

When you first enter the woods,

dancing witches spring out

with laughing roots.

As you walk further in,

they become cities

with sprawling sewage, water, and road systems

under and above ground—roots and stumps and things.

When you first set up a tent,

you read the instructions.

A moment of panic billows

as you look at the disjointed poles dangling

like a broken magician’s wand.

But you must do it, and so you do.

The ground grows closer in the night,

the stars brighter, and your powers more real.

When you first realize

the flashes waking you are lightening,

and hear the river rushing at your back,

wind lifting and whipping through the trees like torrents,

tent billowing behind your down-tilted head cozied riverward,

legs angled up the riverbank for relief from walking,

as if you’re birthing the world in your dreams as the rain crowns,

you are not so much afraid as surprised by the variety of light shows—

fireflies, fires, stars, and storms.

When your first unfriendly neighbor

asks if he needs to get out the videocamera

while you are setting up your tent,

you ask why.

Ask again to his reply: “To send in to America’s Funniest Home Videos”—

Why? When he falls silent, gather yourself on your own turf,

and wave your own, magic bones over the broken snakes on the bare earth.

When your house comes up fast and strong as he watches,

and he says: “Magic,”

you smile and say: “Every time.”

“Company in Green Ridge State Forest, Maryland”

One day, on the way to somewhere important,

I walked into an open field where the rest of my life lay ahead.

Several paths stretched out in different directions.

The night climbed up on the lap of the quiet gray clouds

as I stood still and wondered what would happen.

I had expected wild horses showing the way,

had expected smoke signals pointing out landslides to avoid,

and above all, had expected angels with swords of fire

guarding the most precious and forbidden path of all,

the one I was to fight or seduce them for the taking.

Instead, only this openness greeted me—

the quiet stillness of a familiar peace I’d never known.

The voices of laughing boys and splashing river drifted back

from the way I came, the way I turned back then

to make a new fire by my old tent.

The river was a little different, and me too.

But the fire was all new.

In my tent, I conjured the blanket of my aloneness,

a safety wrapped in everyone who ever helped me,

their arms sewn in my sleeping bag lining.

We held each other as I fell asleep,

and when dawn nudged me forward—

full of time, dreams, and the grace of finding refuge with myself—

we unzipped the seal that had kept me from the world.

Then I climbed out of the cloven pine alone,

and shimmied out into daylight knowing life would be long.

“Vasa Lisa Advises You On Getting Out of Dodge”

Probably the evil step-mother taught you how to hit a baby.

Also: how to falsify a form, use a name you were not given,

change the locks to other people’s houses and let die the fire inside.

Before her, I bet your father taught you how to leave:

at least one family, all people and places of origin,

uncountable beds, an addiction or two, and their imagined causes.

After them, the step-sisters, or maybe it was your brother

or the other neighborhood kids—will have taught you how to carry the pain

like water from the well of the home that was never home,

at the bottom of which you squinted to never quite make out the sun

much less your own face, strain still not to hear the ping of a penny.

How to balance it—very carefully—against gravity

as you haul it around with you everywhere.

Then the witch showed up, right when you were in the darkest part

of the darkest woods on the darkest night of the year.

Some people will ask you why you let this happen.

But we both know it’s her MO. She said you could have the fire

from her human fence-post skulls, you could take it home

to restore life to your own dead hearth. But first—

you had to do something impossible for her.

Listen: You can do impossible things for yourself, too.

You have better things to do than separate the dirt and poppy seeds

of other people’s dreams. Sooner you let go the easy lie of going home,

and the effort to explain your forced departure, the sooner you can wake up

one morning covered in humming and forgiveness, knowing that the doll

in your pocket telling you to run away was neither right nor wrong,

but that hers was your own voice leading you out of the woods all along.

“My New Address Book”

came today. I’ve been meaning to retire the contacts who stare

back when I flip through wanting to talk, and there’s no one there.

There’s nothing wrong with these people I used to know—

the mayor, his women, and the police chief who wanted to know

why they didn’t see it coming.

The petty politicians of my own small town of a heart are grumbling.

I cut the chord of the old address book back west,

put only the people I would want to hear from again in the new book lest

they return with me to the old coast.

Flipped through one day, watering its rows.

There was still no one to call there.

The pages were foreign lines, a wordless stare.

The trick of returning to now is to let it be that alien.

To see what you see, methodically, and look again.

“Books Are Blood”

Give me back my blood.

You have it in boxes.

Don’t ask where I’ll put it.

That’s not your concern.

Give me back my blood.

I miss its warmth on my lap.

It misses me, too.

It cries to have me back.

Although—it’s in me now,

so no on one can keep us apart.

The knowledge—and its passing,

like all things of the heart.

“Flirtation”

If I wanted you, could I have you?

You said to me in my head.

Is that a question of capacity

or permission? a small voice said.

The answer in either case

is probably not. You clapped then.

As if I had said something clever.

It was a pleasure speaking with you

as if you were the kind audience

I had always wanted: so perfectly

attentive, generous, and absent.

“Urban Camping”

Boston bustles below my warm and weary perch.

The nearby roofs look like castles, and my kitchen curtains

sway in the top-floor wind like princess hattails.

Boston must be part of my kingdom, too. I claim it. It claims me.

We cut each other at the harbor and swear by the blood, singing.

A long faint of driving freed me from a life of sleeping.

I steered my own way into this city that welcomed me

with hate-scrawled walls, too-friendly men, and bedbugs,

along with resplendent murals, bookstores, and Victorian houses

under the ever-changing northeastern sky above the laughing Charles

wrapping cowpath pavements, greens, and markets—

this random point on the map, the GPS, and the plans,

all of which broke in the end

under the strain of spilled coffee, stormclouds, and exhaustion,

blurring this random line in space and time marking the end of one journey,

the beginning of the next, and my always-failure to let the line lie.

Everywhere, Boston shows me pretty squares of neatly contained history.

Houses here are built to last. The natives are frank about the presence of the past.

I still don’t know how to say mine is a book not closed, but under revision.

I’m still writing the first forty thousand words on every old battle.

Can’t say who I am. I withdraw into the woods of books and my own head.

Can’t bring myself to buy a bed. Furniture is so permanent and food so expensive.

I don’t know how long I’ll be here and I don’t trust them, but even book-diving

on the T, the natives draw me out to talk to me. That’s how I came to realize

this is my home city. One of many.

“November Morning, On the Way”

“My heart was pounding. I stood a while, listening to the small sounds of the woods and looking at the stars. After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.”

—“May,” Mary Oliver

A young man held my hand this morning, smiled.

His hand was soft.
His smile was not a smile.

I felt him coming up alongside me, too close.

Have you ever seen a snake unnameable for darkness?

When I met your eyes you must have, frozen as you were

when I grabbed back the bag
and the liquid, loud, and unfenced voice

outpoured over the oncoming train, growing louder

as the quiet deer of people’s selves nosed out of the bushes

of their blending, cool, and silent mind. Nobody moved. They never do.

It’s ok. But hearing that voice, I had to walk away. I’ve never been so angry.

Darling, it was full of papers—poetry and plays and things.

Only my soul. Nothing of value to anybody else.

Still your warmth and softness in my hand. I hope you'll be alright.

Still with the train coming, my only instinct is to fight.

Still holding my bag of light.

“The Poet Speaks of Shame”

Make a safe space for me to make a mess—

a home for strange noise and vast vats of boiling soup—

—and I will make something beautiful,

and slip it to you around the boulder and under the door

of the paint-slung cave where I crouch, dancing

when I can be almost certain from the shadows that no divers persist here.

But tell me I am not allowed to make a mess—

tell me I am bad, as I know, as my skin and breath have known and confessed—

and I will lose faith in your goodness.

And what’s more, once more, in my own ear

for sweetness in the flowers of people’s faces, hands, and cupboards.

Even the moss and bats tell me then that I trespass in every corner.

How is it that you dare address me?

Oh, I have named my self, and we are illegible—

the Raggedy Thing with his impossible desires,

the Odd Foil without its own character arc,

and who cannot speak for shame.

That animal still will not tell me her name.

But I have followed her, mad with hunger but too curious for the kill,

to see where she feeds, and where she lies down and sleeps.

And so it was that, by accident or fate, one day she showed me

her secret. How her hideous pulsing goes home to live in all fallen animals,

how they gulp and swallow that rush of quiet blood and defeated sweat

that’s the way she unzips her skin and climbs out of it yet.

Do you have any idea how many times she has failed that you may breathe?

How many deaths an unnameable and precious woman has suffered

to bring you here, and her body lost forever in time’s muddy reeds?

Forgiveness is a flourishing in the body of the world.

Flowers do not require voice, though without light,

their singing hushes quickly to the crushed sweetness of all things.

“The Gospel of Heraclitus”

A fire. A river.

I must tell you this.

An angel in a waterfall,

falling or flying into the unbroken white light

of the future below, eyes fixed forever

on the dancing fish and flowers reflecting

in the rapids above that only ever crash.

Here is the news.

Beyond the cage of bones and fluttering of breaths and their interpretation,

a woman’s chest laid bare by X-ray or other vision

flutters larkspur wings for lungs.

The difficulty of weighing butterflies in flight

implies the perks of displacement—

the fluttery thing weighting the water of the body

to show what lives and dies in the soul.

The butterfly lung lobes of the within

that can only be seen without being seen

and are born of holding all things without judgment

fly out of the chest of dying fear, anger, and shame.

Here it is.

The defeated woman who lies down in the muddy reeds of the world

and dies forever that we might live

holds in her butterfly lungs all knowledge.

You cannot touch her with the mind, or pin her with wire—

you’ll break her. Only know her in your body.

From despair to experiment and back again, changed.

Every river of despair is different, and every self in it.

But I know something wonderful. Listen.

There is one idea, but like light it has two forms.

The linear particle—its line on the map showing the river’s home—

and the water’s chaotic wave. Chaos is a butterfly who leaves

her cage of chest by looking into the four faces of darkness,

flying into the wind, changing and being changed

by the currents of that flowing river reflecting the light-crossed clouds,

touching first one point and then another with the same, sparkling color—

the light of the sociality of dreams that touches all things.

As for the body of that woman.

What is left of her when the butterfly has dropped its weight,

stirring a storm from Paradise and making a beautiful, cosmic mess?

Although her dust never completely scatters

and the crow sings forever over her bones,

still she cries out of the opening cocoon of her mouth

a wordless, wild, and bleeding fire, offered first in desperation,

then in hunger to hear what it might have to feed her,

and at last out of love and without attachment.

Honor me, she says to the world. Eat it. Or don’t. And walks away.

In the fire’s face, a fox that is the forest, its trees and roots.

A wild darkness growing up from under the branches of being.

All things will perish in this fire.

All things behind the light of this place

remain the same—no time, space, flaw or isolated facet of the universal face.

I have never felt such peace in my soul.

Home in the World

“streets are public land, the most public property that belongs to everyone.”

— Robert Tannen

“Give”

Give me your best question.

I will run out into the woods with it,

and never give it back.

But it may return to you yet,

of its own accord—

leaner, grinning,

and with a present.

“Nobody Told Me”

I could give back the bird

around my neck. Unwind his spindly grip,

and let him fly.

“[  ] ←”

represents the complete set of all giveable fucks.

Ask me one more time for a plan,

and I’ll point to the next available tree.

“Yes, I Have Been A Translator”

Yes, I have been a translator

of the secret language of my heart.

It is not necessary for you to learn the language.

“There Was A Little Girl”

When my luck was younger, she had a curl.

When she was good, she was very, very good.

But when she was bad—she’s better when she’s older.

“Reverse Hecuba”

The wounded dog

who is a deer

limps toward

the nightlight

of the approaching train.

Lies down

with her head

in the clanging lap.

Iron and wind

tuck her in.

The train passes

like night

like life

and like death.

Morning comes.

A new woman stands.

“Anna K. Walks Away”

When I got up off the train tracks, it was so bright.

In the white light, a butterfly flapping its wings changed the wind

that the train had whipped as it passed over me in the night.

“Wtf, Butterfly?”

What’s a pretty

little thing like you

doing with a magic

gold star tucked

inside her butterfly

pouch? The empty

pouch of unwantededness

you filled yourself,

freed by feeling

safe to know

in your body

at last what

the world wants

that you have

to give her,

something so

simple you can

hardly believe its power,

something so

huge you can’t

see how it fits

in that tiny pouch,

nestled softly into

feeling right, feeling

whole, feeling—

just someone who

understands  that

when she feels safe,

she can be amazing.

“A Pretty Poem About Signaling and Flowers”

Heraclitus and the river of fire is the problem

with the theory of signaling in military strategy.

Look at me when I’m talking to you

about signaling and flowers.

When we row out into the world

toward the shores where we think we are going,

how swiftly the river of light changes!

Light breaks like that, of course.

Everything of value is breakable.

Think of coal. How it breaks in a fire

to make more light from its darkness.

Or in the furnace of a train, the light of speed.

Or in deepest darkness, underground, a diamond.

You were wrong, Elizabeth,

about the utility

of staring out the window.

The light lives there.

“Raggedy Thing”

My dear soul, you are a Raggedy Thing.

For a wrong lifetime, I didn’t know your name.

Like a wild horse under a gentle rider,

you run the show whether or not I know.

Alright, then. This thing is on. Let’s go.

“Wild Horses”

The wild horses I expected in the clearing

in the woods of peace where my soul

who had not spoken to me for so long

curled up by the fire and sang—

they’re here now, they’re here, the horses!

Oh, how I want to be gentle so they don’t run away.

But oh, how I want to run with them.

Slowly, head bent, hoof tentative, I approach.

And then we are dancing, and I don’t know

why I never knew I was a wild horse,

except, of course, I always knew.

Now touch my face like you know and don’t know

that this wild horse has eaten lightening and duststorms.

Maybe men have tried to break this wild horse,

but she will never tell you because she is busy dancing.

And you can see that it doesn’t matter anyway,

because wild horses are beautiful, unbroken, and sweet.

“This Is My Raft”

My far-off, bobbing thing. The wind on my face

Tells me we’ll end up in the same place.

But not for a long while. Still lots of sailing to do.

You’re so far off, but you see me through.

When I can’t see you for crashing waves or swirling sand,

I look for your smiling face in the sky—happy sea, happy land.

Sometimes I can’t remember my dreams, but I know you’re there

when I wake up laughing with pictures everywhere.

The only way to be safe

is to brave the rough waters of the world.

You keep showing me the trick of balance in the currents’ strafe.

You keep afloat by having no solid walls, to feel the wind unfurled.

“This Is My Tent”

Get out.

Look, there’s a lot of fire here,

and I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Probably the whole structure goes, right?

I don’t see what else can happen,

although the flame doesn’t feel hot

and the woman inside is smiling.

“This Is My House”

Baby, somebody gonna break my glass house.

I worked so hard to be able to move freely around it again,

if ever. Do you know what it is to be frozen and unmoored?

Baby, my glass house is stronger than you think.

There’s a light shining through it

that surprises me more than you.

Baby, there are parts of my house that will always be made of glass.

You’re welcome here and we have work to do.

Now I am asking you to treat me like a lady.

“The Sociality of Dreams”

This is going to be a very short poem,

because there couldn’t possibly be anything new to say

about the light shining down from the clouds

in the field of flowers where we dance.

It’s not my light and it’s not your light—

but that’s not quite right.

It belongs to all of us,

which is not to say

you mustn’t have your own fire.

For you must.

“Rainbow from Above”

Flying from gray city to city,

a rainbow by the plane—

even you are whole above, and half below.

“Dawn in Time”

The fog is here.

The dawn has come.

Ducks float in the parking lot.

I wonder in, chilled with disappointment.

Sudden yolk of sun cracks the window shell.

I was not too late after all, but only a bit early.

“The Listening Heron”

Mast skeleton bells and birds clank happy hello

To the new day’s dawning. The clouds are many butterflies

Swaying across the purple sky. The water is laughing.

You do not have to deal with this new day now.

A heron lights on a tree, listening.

What you do next does not concern him in the least.

He is too busy staring into the sun.

Feeling the wind in his downy coat,

And in the sway of his togetherness with the tree.

With the ground. With the bay reflecting like a river of fire

The flickering vibrations of the boats, the wind, the smiling sun,

And the great joke of honking geese and hungry gulls.

But we shall go now, he and I, while the storm is on the horizon.

Not so far you can’t see it.

Not so close you can’t rise up and ride it home.

“Stain Louis”

Blood, fences, fleurs de lis,

white clouds over muddy river.

How will we wash you?

“Showing Up to the Mistake”

“Lots of people survive being shot in the fact,”

I mistyped after the commotion below my window.

Showing up to the mistake was as easy as that.

Answering the call to go out into the world and love

Was a bit more involved. Moving ground below. Migrating thought above.

“2 Corinthians 1:3-5”

In the lonely hotel room, in the bedside drawer,

There was a storyteller.  And the storyteller was good.

He was so good, he showed me how to play a better game than checking out.

We played it together. It’s the game of comforting others with stories.

He lives in the drawer, with no one to tell him stories when he’s alone.

That seems like a ghost in the God machine.

Even the man behind the curtain needs a Dorothy to take him home.

Forget this guardian stuff. Who will comfort the comforters?

“Every Day”

There’s a guy who paints the Golden Gate Bridge

Every day. It takes three years to paint the whole bridge.

It only took 18 months to build it.

There were no unions then.

Rest and safety were not concerns.

In the beginning, only the vision mattered.

Getting it down, putting it up.

Then, it became necessary to make it visible.

To help people see what was there, bridging shores.

Slowly to paint. Only to start again when the job is done.

“To a Tiny Tree in St. James’s Park, London”

Hello, holy thing.

Unscarred by wind or rain.

Thankful for the sun and flowers,

Swaying gently through the hours.

Seagulls survey and pigeons coo.

The fountain rushes rocks and blue.

All making noise but me and you.

“Walkabout the Thames”

Seagulls—my harbinger of travel.

But I just got here.

Of course seagulls—it’s a port.

And anyway I never stay in one place too long.

The rainbow ocean lapped Iceland’s pot of shore and I was gone.

Forget everything, again, on the other side of the bridge.

“I Will Be the Truest Thing”

I will be the truest thing in the summer sun.

I will bloom and green, and leap and run.

I will be the truest thing in the wintry snow.

You’ll feel me falling softly, and never hear me go.

In spring I’ll be the truest flower smiling at the rain.

And in fall I’ll rise up with the frost, and float down again.

“Dreamers Rise”

The sightline sets the arrow’s course.

The dove looks up before she flies.

Fish face where they’re swimming.

And dreamers rise.

The prophets speak of light.

Moonrise hugs the night.

Lovers look in lovers’ eyes.

And dreamers rise.

Church ceilings draw gaze up and out.

Prows point the course for boats.

My faith is strong in the living future’s cries,

because dreamers rise.

“To Be Given the World”

Somebody said, “I’m gonna give you the world.”

I didn’t see his face. I didn’t even get partial plates.

But because I believed him—something in his words

rang true, and anyway I was enjoying my temporary insanity—

I left the station where the prince’s childhood friends and I were waiting

on a boat that never leaves the harbor.

Went out to where I thought he’d said to meet him.

And, waiting, wandered new home streets, always but never alone.

He never came, but I kept listening and looking

for a voice, a face, a sign that he was with me.

And the searching made the signs friendlier,

a graffiti artist turned red lights into hearts.

When I meet him, in this life or the next,

I know already part of what we’ll say.

“You promised me the world,” I’ll shake my finger.

“You had to trust me to go out and get it yourself,” he’ll smile.

And I’ll know that was his power all along.

The light inside the magic locket being the young girl’s own face.

The man behind the curtain waiting, hoping

for some sweet, lost lady to stand up to him and sing.

Photo (c) Dennis van Zuijlenkom - 2015About the Author

Vera Katelyn Wilde is an artist from Alabama. A reformed Harvard Kennedy Fellow, she holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Virginia and roams Western Europe.

Photo: Dennis van Zuijlekom – 2015 ©