Angel of Loneliness

Of course there's no one,
especially not an angel
though the air seems overly receptive
as if it's leaving room for something
to arrive. The only tracks in the snow
are her own, leading from the back door
to the birdfeeder where wind above the drifts 
fashions wings of such a force and size 
she can feel the muscles 
underneath the pinions as they push her back
and sweep across the yard. 

There's no one here but her, 
a lone woman breaking 
a path to the feeder, her body 
all these years untouched, 
unfeathered. It's the cold—
this winter  there's too much of it—
that makes its presence known,
inside and out.  She can feel it 
blunt her skin, grip the morning 
and all that's tethered to the earth
in its unforgiving fist.

 
Angel of Grief		

He shows up in my mother's bedroom,
wings soiled, all down the sides
piss-yellow stains, the rust of blood,
and along the feathers' hem a dazzling green 
as if, to get to me, he flew too low across the sea 
and gathered up its phosphorescence.

Part of me understands why he is here—
I've grief enough and there's something 
sacred about this place and what I'm doing,
emptying my mother's dresser, 
the only thing she claimed as hers alone,
the house too small, too poor to keep a secret.

She warned me as a child not to snoop
but I find nothing in the drawers a daughter 
shouldn't see:  two old swimsuits, hand-made, 
loosening around the legs, white cotton bras 
and briefs she ordered from the catalogue, 
a few with bare elastic showing, all intimate
and washed and washed—I couldn't be sadder.

The angel doesn't speak, at least not here, 
not to me, but there's a susurration 
in the room as if he's brought the wind with him
to keep alive his wings. He won't be trapped. 
I've yet to see his face. I don't know if
he is weeping. His head is bowed, white
hair falling over ears and forehead
—enough of him. Here, he's less 
important than my mother, her last things; 
they slip through my fingers to the garbage sack
and leave their mark on me like scalding water.

 
Giving Up

The last of the moon is fed up.
It's given them enough light below
to do something good, enough light
to read by, to find what was bright
within them.

Let them do their work in darkness, the bad
and good of it. Let the cereus cease its shining.
Let the man betray the boy he was and never once 
look up.

The moon will turn itself off tonight.

The sand that is dry will stay dry.
The Coon hound and the Blood 
will lower their heads and make no sound. 

No one will go mad tonight.
No one will ride a silver slip across the waters,
and no one, no one, no one will fall
in love.

 
Cure for Love

The heart is an old bucket, 
its beats echoing inside the tin.

Most would say it's something softer, 
fixate on its ache, its broken pieces.

The heart prefers the whole, the actual,
the hardened unbeloved. 

Fill it with potatoes 
forked from the earth, new in their jackets. 

A little butter, 
a little salt will help it heal.

 
Extreme Creation

The hummingbird—small, 
fierce flower, its long stamen 
hardened to a beak stitching the air
as if its purpose was to needlepoint
a sampler of summer's beauty.

God cut it from its stem,
fastened tiny feet
and let it fly. This happened 
on the last day in the hour
set aside so he could look 
at what he'd done, do a double-take,

turn blossoms into birds and visa versa,
dapple, split, ravish, shim 
into the million things he'd made
the outrageous (deepening the dip
behind the human collarbone, painting
red stripes on the long cheeks of the turtle) 

outrageous beauty and its opposite: 

the shit-brown 
slime of wood slugs
to which he added, to mix it up,
more delicate than newborn fingers,
two soft horns 
touched with the tip of his tongue
to make them shine.


Finally

The word Love means someone takes you
in your old clothes, your face too bare, too open,
when someone fastens the buttons on your coat
as if you've fallen back through sixty years to be 
a child again, when someone takes you onto the path
holding you by the arm, your feet not knowing what
they used to know, your feet in rubber boots stumbling, 
blind to roots and stones, when someone takes you 
to the ocean, the water also in the air raining down 
its saltless weeping, the word Love means someone 
takes you to the rocks, rain too heavy for the gulls
to fly, three bobbing like windless boats, all sails 
and heartbeat, Love leaves you there, no words 
for it now, you and the gulls and the ocean 
that moves as far away from you as it can go.    

 
The Ambiguity of Clouds

Never mind, the clouds say
as they drift above her. Never mind.
When you first heard them
as a child, you thought they meant

let it go, don't fuss about it,
believing the phrase implied
all would be fine
if you didn't obsess, if you didn't 
let things fester.

Time has taught you another
meaning; death has taught you,
loneliness has taught you.
It's never the mind

that gets you close to beauty, 
the first and last of things, 
or any of the wisdoms you long to know. 
There's no word for what can take you there

though it has something to do with the eyes of horses,
the body's workings,  whiskers sandpapering across a cheek,
a woman's laugh loud enough to bend a row
of ripening wheat. Who laughed
like that and when? And where were you?

Never mind, never mind,
is it possible the clouds say that,
mindless as they are? All
body,  if you can call them  that,
cumulative and shifting shape, 

mare's tails, ephemera, fish bones,
a lung bleached of blood,
an inky brain, not thinking,
just folding and refolding all afternoon
long sheets of rain. They never mind.