Every part of the world
seems an altar, and I do not
know how to pray.

Our garden is a fairytale this
morning, misty and faint

like a Japanese poem. You can almost
grasp the moment: Scattered last remnants

of moonlight on pond water.
The peonies painted in blotches of pink.

1
At the edge
of a scrapyard in Iowa
a girl in a blue dress sits
on a tire swing, legs flying.
A frog croaks hoarsely
from the well of her throat.

Stay inside. Watch how life
starts in secret places. Blossoms lather
in sudsy layers on the bare,
rubbed-raw knuckles and fingers
of the cherry trees. The flycatcher
outside your window sings whit
or clip or whee.

I can’t be quiet—my mouth gets itchy
when it has words in it. I want
to get my brain out of my mouth
so silence can bless my throat.
I wish this wasn’t real life
and I was just a refrigerator.

* Collage poem

I don’t recognize myself
in the rosy sunset, nor in the sliver of half-
moon dissolving like a wafer
on the tongue of twilight. I recognize
myself in the peeling bark
of the Sycamore, each layer shredded
over the last.

My sister and I press our ears
against the opening of this

particular instant, polished
like the aperture of a fluted shell—

Can you taste this much beauty in your mouth of mouths, lick up this
much truth with your heart’s tongue? A song
in Mi’kmaq, a young native woman’s voice. Her body’s rain-like, inward
swaying to the tune, her hair blackbirds sleeping.

In Lamson woods
I cross paths
with a man hunched

under a neon
green umbrella.
It is raining…

every afternoon at four. Her name is Maria. She tells me my mother hangs
in the crown of the Sycamore, watching me. My father is there,

too. I can’t see either of them, of course, though I strain, staring into sunlight.

Once I felt the pulse
of a dying songbird,

my finger softly pressed
to its throat.

A moth’s tetrapterous body is impaled—
as if by the pins of its eyes—

on the green screen door of my kitchen.

The sun’s lips kiss the earth
goodbye so fervently
they bleed

Stars sparkle with glory
but are dead
and don’t know anyone’s story

Prayers burn deep inside the throat like votives.
Identity is a peg on which we hang our time.

A murder of crows dressed
in feather tuxedos twirl
on a dance floor of asphalt
in a ballroom of snow

with the stiff and scarlet-
clad corpse of a doe.

When I was five, my family and I visited
the cloister gardens of Valldemosa, Spain, briefly home

to Chopin and George Sand, the romantic names still
clinging to vine and moss on old stone,

My heart, like the wildly pounding sea,
is a metronome measuring brevity.

I rest my head on my own skull at night
and sleep not an inch from my death
as a scorpion lives with its sting.

beads of days prayed one
by one, worried smooth
in the fingers of time

again      and      again
the unleavened moon dissolving
on night’s repentant tongue

Music is composed of notes, the body
of dust motes. Arrangement determines
color, size, shape. Open the shades.
See: dust motes twirl in ball gowns of light,

No matter how much you add to hate,
the final sum turns into a fraction

while love is a substance that augments with subtraction.

I wait until all petals have fallen.
Then truth stands alone:

yellow unused pollen on a stem with thorns,
crowns without queens.

When things get lost, where do they go?
I don’t mean the hair clip, the striped umbrella,
a borrowed book. I mean: Where in space
is there a place for what is left of things
once they expire or seem extinct?

In the morning she slept late until I came
to bring her tea in bed, a napkin, a plate
with toast and cheese. Slurred she’d say, So soon?
and raise her body—stolid, languorous whale—
from the sea of dreams it had been swimming in.

My words fall lightly
like the gauze shawls

your hand pulls
endlessly

out of the magic hat
of my body

There is a kiss that sounds like the howl of an owl
in a forked elm near a marsh
where trains pass. Have you heard?

It is a kiss that hasn't yet been kissed.