She wanted to plant a tree below her left shoulder. Her skin, the earth, the color of tea— but a history of ink is older. Below her left shoulder she wanted a tree with her initials, blood-chiseled yet bolder to make it official. She wanted a tree with […]
She should in ground unsanctified have lodged / Till the last trumpet. For charitable prayer / Shards, flints and pebbles should be thrown on her. – from Hamlet Men always want to throw something at your body: words, pebbles, their own naked bodies. Sometimes I throw […]
Such pellagra of psyche her bequest to me. Visions visited her, and voices too. Mom heard. Saved scores of people from death, dismemberment, by seeing accidents in her head and laying it all at the feet of the good Lord. Crazy was our norm. Of course, various people tried to […]
Because only dwarf birches grow here, we dream of tall trees. Where we came from, a conifer was a church. Ask the pine, the yew. Ask the spruce how it makes its mind a mirror. To watch wind riffle leaves: even the smallest tree is being told a […]
Live trees mourn the dead ones, feed their roots for years : thin flanks of a worn-out doe, her twins won’t make it, either ‘And I did not weary myself in wishing that a daisy could see the beauty of its shadow’ Susan Tichy’s most […]
The pause of the blood, the not now or ever impasse of womb, iron of emptiness, the buried plasma roots of beginning, the end of the eggs, the un-union of skin, the played out tryst, the staunched memory, stolen heirloom, scarred slit wrist, the un-hatched, un-cried, dried blown […]
Just this light. And it might go on forever. Stare straight. The sun wants your shadow long as a list of crimes. Pardon the beggar her hassle. Pardon the thief his capture of night. This is how we live the summer, in a blinding. Blind to the sanderling […]
The cemetery’s metal crescents glint across the road from the corrugated roofs of the village, each crescent aloft above an eighth-scale stucco structure, & I quote Lewis Mumford who proclaimed The city of the dead antedates the city of the living, & Bill, a trained philosopher, objects: that […]
After Rain, Steam and Speed–The Great Western Railway, 1844 For these boys it’s the closest they’ll come to church genuflected beyond the tree line a vestibule where jewelweed and foxglove needle hairless limbs goosebumps rise […]
America on the brink of war, 1940, and my father born on a dairy farm turned to dust. In San Bernardino, Dick and Mac open McDonald’s Bar-B-Q, car hop service and a large menu of fifteen cent single patties, seventeen with cheese. War Machine. War spreads. Suburbs. The […]