More on: Poetry

I too half-curled, half-clutched
in bedclothes, writing the light full
then fitful as it ascends into cloud drift,
warm snarls of will among fluid states

No thing made 
or unmade, or born or yet to be, can separate us from the Love 
that drew us forth from weave to know the weave and return to it. 

She reads their names aloud, 
men, beloved to some, 
lynched in Little River County,
Arkansas, each appellation
engraved on a six-foot 
steel slab

I made you a promise I intended to keep:
I will cover my body; I will keep your words near
like the pearl at the curve of my ear. 

It wasn’t long before I began
pinching myself for fat, for acne, learned
to hate my body in a swimsuit, in clothes.

I pace the cracked suburban paving.
Fiats gust, lizards flick, Jesus

Christ: that ankle-speck of a rat hound 
bashing the railings, baying.

It wasn’t a death exactly, though I’ve been
undone by deaths the same way.

Once a week he holds me against him like a child and I inhale wood and horse and earth, sometimes  sweat (not sharp with the agony of hurry but warm,   like a tree trunk seeping sap on a sunny day); I keep  my eyes closed, as if afraid time will shift like a rocking boat beneath my feet, and that…

God the God of the cement silo, sunset-stained,
and the conveyor
                                         running through the night.

I was born out of terror,
             horn-caught and tangled,

                            pulled from the brush
with a cry of thorn and leaf.