Implement

I lean across the field’s best places,
rock-strewn, weedy,
ready for the plow.

I hoe down the rows with my fingers,
turning loam over,
wishing for shade.

My watering can is empty and I need a gentle rain,
something to irrigate me,
make me worthy.

I know, in the soles
of my mud-crusted boots
that God loves a farmer.

(The Tenderloin, part 10)

The Bonsai Juniper



I watch the sheffilera push out,
unfolding it’s tiny umbrellas of new growth,
so young they are still tinged ochre and aching for light.
There was a bonsai Juniper tree on the sill last year,
but I left it to you, and it died.

And you, I see, are sleeping,
some mild, soma dream creating creases in your forehead,
sleeping, as if you could escape me there.
The dotted landscape of the other side of day and night
will not protect you.
I have my hand in this soil.

You belong in my house like all the other living things here,
the cockroaches, the dust, the fungus on the bathroom tiles,
all things beloved for their sheer audacity to continue upward,
toward warmer regions.
They have made themselves at home in this atmosphere,
cat and lint alike,
but you sleep on while the parasites devour your spindly branches.

I am the woman who loves you.
Haven’t I cried enough to make you grow?
Push out,
collect over me,
run rampant through my kitchen like the pests.
Wake up now. Wake up.

Mercer County

I came up out of the tobacco fields covered
in small red welts like chiggers under my skin,
tiny bugs of fear and paranoia that itched
for the calamine lotion of Ebenezer Baptist Church,

and I shouted out the hymns
(would you be free from the burden of sin)
while the ladies of the congregation
gave each other permanent waves
and stitched together patchwork pieces
of Vacation Bible School and come-to-Jesus fabric,
biscuit-making, jam-canning women who won prizes
at fairs for their ability to produce perfect pie crusts.
while their men traded feed secrets
and hunted with howling coon dogs.

In the pitchblack country night
I lay under those redemption quilts
chanting the Twenty-Third Psalm
while all around me the evangelical
crickets jumped and sang

and even they, it seemed, knew God.

The Tattoo

I rise again from one more little death.
This city is not my enemy
nor any test of my good judgement.
It cannot bury me.
I have spoken to, dreamed of, and made love to
as many men as any of us have cried wasted tears
and I am a full-grown woman for it.
I was born to the South and force-fed
grits and Jesus until I could not breathe.
My lungs are full of riverwater
where I sank and drowned
and was saved over and over.
Sometimes I am martyred
Sometimes I am murdered
Sometimes I kill myself.
Saint, victim, sinner.
I have risen so many times that
every morning is another Easter.
There are lillies tatooed on my back
for all these recurrent ressurections.

Deadfall

up here
the fireroad follows the ridge
spine on spine
God’s finger
furrowing out deadfall
flicking at cedar or redwood
to indicate this one or that one
food for all things small
and six or eight-legged
deadfall
charred and blackened
and laid to rest beside the fireroad
or hacked away and discarded
or uprooted by the seawind
found sometimes
carving through the niche between the hills,
this one or that one
covered with deadfall cedar or pine
to indicate the spine of the ridge

up here
we are lovers
following the ridge
following the fireroad
to the niche between the hills,
poems for one another,
beguiled by sunlight in the hair
and sillouettes against the eternal blue,
and below us, cows,
statued against
a shelf of land that
used to belong to the sea,
and below them the sea itself, glistening,
bluer than the air we stand in
up here.

and all of this for us,
all of this moment,
every piece of grass in place,
every branch stirred,
and even Spanish moss,
found sometimes miles beyond where it started,
miles beyond where it should be,
hanging on pine or cedar or redwood
deadfall.