Anthers of wildflowers close when damp. All the voices
that fill us as we speak Flowers of early spring often lift a coat
of hair against the cold. Suffering has a future unlike
guilt and misery I drive the grandmother valley searching
for deer in windrows, pulling each through the window,
needling a tapestry. If I can see one hundred deer
in an evening, friends might survive. Sympathetic economy.
Are you then responsible for everything
Because we always save some part of what is best to taste
again, I canned blackberries while an electrical storm
racketed.
I dreamed brambles locked the cabin and Bud Martin came to
gather.
Bud Martin, Bud Martin, Doom Doom Doom He grabbed
thorns
with his bare hands, Is it because I am an adult his red bone
hounds hooting,
as I turned in my grandmother's embroidered linen,that
everything delicious
is wounded that steaming pulp had gotten inside me,
wounding vinegar
of blackberries, 3:30 am the other woman on the mountain
listening too.
Let me be as happy next year as last Skinny girl blows away
the milky wicks
of her birthday flame. I surrounded myself with adults The
man who fed cats
to his hounds dumped a colt over the ravine, her ankles tied,
because I knew
they would not harm me drove a blue flatbed along our road
Must one rehearse
the failures of suffering his arm slung out the window. Is it
death or merely loneliness
when he studies you? I bucket flowers at dusk, the inability
to solve look inside blindless
windows tocare for anyonereally the hope chest a
grandfather carved, the maroon
velvet sofa—this tableau—the moment before something bad
happens in a fairytale.
Blackberries come when tomatoes are ripe, cherries, dill and
basil. Eggplant deepening.
Giant red peppers. On her way from Farmers' Market she
meets her lover outside a bar.
He pulls her inside where they make love in the Ladies'
Room. Nothing frightens him.
Not bullets. Not rules. Juxtapose hazard and refuge She
loses her underclothing
or he steals it. Walking across the asphalt, she flips the back
of her dress at him.
Skirts were short then. A wreck cruises the corner the soul
remains untouched
and a gang of boys hoots. Happy, she knows she is neither
more nor less
than the cling-free peaches in her car, the parchment sacks of
silver queen.
A character might dissolve, merge into another Call him Choir
Boy, who sits
dead center on the newly upholstered antique sofa, sings
Amazing Grace
while two women flank him—a teacher and a divorcée—each
feeling faint, fluttery
in their admiration. Thicket, that which is meant to lure us
He has curls on his neck
glistens and jingles, has thorns down below We talk about
canning. He says his mother
would never approve—these women let fruit waste in the grass,
apricots, plums, sweetly fallen from branches, rotting
uneaten uncanned. He says abstinence sharpens the senses
think of roses, civilization, think of sharp thistles that feed tiny
finches
I take eggs from Choir Boy's hand as he prepares to make
omelettes.
"I'll do the cooking in my own kitchen," I had wanted to save
these visitors from the pain I felt gathering. Do we fall toward
the wound
The teacher worked a year to buy that car to absorb it sooner, be
done
to drive West. To buy cowboy boots for Choir Boy. And what of
pleasure
She wrote: "It happened in my parents' bedroom in Santa Fe.
My mother
overheard them plotting." and the wounds of others Choir Boy
and the Divorcée
plotting is it biochemical to be lovers rational once they return
from vacation.
The moon drooped raw yolk. The fact that we are alive
in the midst of agony I spoke with my oldest friend long distance
minutes before her coma. I don't know where I'll be in a few
days
I don't know where I'm going It had been a wonderful July
afternoon
picking blackberries, swimming in mica-spangled water,
on the ride home I'd read Plath on Lucretius: the tragedy
of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
If we die a bit with each partner, how long will faith
continue?
The woman with whom I first discussed god and poker,
who gave me TABU—black vial of perfume—I recall every book
we studied together in every impoverished room. Is empathy
where we make the world?The black widow spider on the swing,
whole again the thickets of tomatoes. The grace of her acrobatic
body,
give it the integrity we feel the world must have limber friend
bending
and flipping to show the resilience of a woman's spine.
Blackberry
briars lock my legs like Exacto knives leaving long purple
slashes.
Schizophrenia the painter who said I think I should not exist
exists only
in this century. They have to lock me in a room. I go off
talking civilization
about pollution, running naked through fields in New
England. Consciousness
is a fortress: Maybe one day we will live with Valerio's family
in Italy surrounded
by hazelnut groves. There is a grape harbor exposure then
seclusion and lakes
with forests in back. All the people live in the village. These
are the wounds of midlife
All the women wear black. When the stress gets too much,
when I lose control of my mind,
I start babbling about nuclear warfare when we know too
much and they have to lock me up.
The hunters in this valley say an antelope gives birth to two
fawns Nature works
and reworks the same formal themes one to feed the coyotes,
branching spiraling
meandering the other to keep for herself. Long drive through
moosewood,
swamp maple There is nothing in this world but curved empty
space My companion talked
to his ex about trying marriage again. She said she is too fat,
she won't go outside,
she won't come back to him. The English call blackberries
nuisance fruit, flummery.
The best ones, says my companion, are impossible to reach
So what do we have
to do with the existence of the world all brief flesh and
stiletto.