Daisy-Days

You said you stomach heaved,
so I gave it ipecac
and let it heave some more
until you were all outside your skin
and I fell laughing.
It’s a pose you know well enough,
from those days
where you would reach up
to catch the bird wings for a hat
but would trip and legs would somersault
around your head until you thought
it was a prank and we smiled
at each other.
I like your smile,
I said, but you thought you didn’t like mine,
too toothy and my teeth were never pretty.
But you didn’t like pretty anyway.
So we sat around and colored sea cows
with pink and purple, and for lunch
we ate a few white circles
that we’d popped from the sides
of our school folders.
Ipecac, mother cried, where’s
my ipecac?
We giggled.  It was all for fun,
and we hid under the dining room table,
counting the dark circles where we’d once
stuck blue gum.
Our hands stuck rainy days
to the underside of the table and we rushed
into the yellow daisy-days, and mother kept yelling about
her ipecac, where the -hell-
is her ipecac, but we’d already begun
to blame it on the dog.

Come Hell or High Water

Had the snow come down in such a turmoil
as to shield you from me, then blind I would have walked,
with nothing for warmth but my rags and bones and
blank stares into my eyelids.

The ground is hot beneath us, so brace yourself
against the envy of the under-places, their fingers caught
in their mouths while they watch us perform tricks
they’ve never seen in their fire pits or iron chambers.

I was never much of a singer, but for you I’ll steal
the chords of a nightingale and make you pine for me,
sitting high in the trees and eager to fall into your arms
if only you were there and hadn’t been stuck at the crossing

of the rivers, which seem to mourn for us already as they
blunder blindly away from this mountain I’ve been placed on.
And maybe they’ll find some siren to pass through them
and maybe she’ll carry some message from you to me,

but darling, come hell and high water, I’ll find my way back
so we can kick the stars away and make our own little nest
in the dark folds of each other’s legs.  I promise it, so take
this bone from my chest and expose me to you.

If the devil came to take you from me, it’d be no surprise
that I’d toss my soul at him to cover his eyes while we stole
away.  It’s no surprise that when we cross again, I’ll stroke
the water to calm it so you can be safe in your walking,

and on the other side, come hell and high water, I’ll strip
your clothes off and sing to you again, just to feel your chest
rise in response, quicker now, like a metronome counting off
the seconds until I kiss you back to this world.

Intrepid

I once dove into the sharp-fanged waves and collapsed
in the fur of a suckling wolf, cheeks pressed to a belly
heaving and sighing with hurt, and I told her that if she just
held it in, held it away, then slithering on it would go, returning
to the sea and its creatures of lore-

in the big-fish ponds, there are monsters on fins

on nursing mud that rises up to the clouds and expels
its last breath in the fire, crackling still in a hearth damp
with renaissance paint.  I am retired in the hairline
moors, when the wolves are rotten with rust and iron
and there’s no one to defend the motherland but I.

When the waves come clutching for marriage, mother wolf
will stand to her last shattered bone and I will defend
this home I have bound to my breast.

Picaresque I

I nurse the lashings on my palms
into forest fires
that smolder silently in waking hours
when the wind is quiet and creeps
along the matted grass of rolling hills

and I might set them racing tonight,
for fear I’ll catch them and set them blazing
like beacons calling crows to feast
upon the bounty of a thousand joyous human bonds-
only the crows are to be open.

With ragged palms I’ll induce each twirling girl
to slumber in sheets of gold,
and with callous palms I’ll have her weave
straw-bent tears from scavenged bones
caught on the trailing hem of her sleepless nights;

where are the stars tonight, where are
the rainstorms that come wading in to drown out
wallowing footsteps against soft mud, sucking the soles
with each breath, and where are the wagers I bet
that said every mountain of raised flesh on my hands

would be cured by the spittle of smog from the vagabonds
as the sun struggled to clench the sky in his fists.