Poetry

 

woman, etymology of

Mapping the bloom back
            to the precise chromosomal
            glitch

To the point of derivation,
            the location of deviation
            a metropolis circled in red,
                      the too rigorous life
            metastasizing like urban
                      sprawl.

Cells piling like skyscrapers,
            they come from inside,
                      the materials we build with,
                      the cast iron frames, double helix
                                   blueprint

Extensions of nature, cities poking
            too large phalli to the sky,
                          perverse, yet natural

If the roots are mapped back
            far enough. Wif-mann,
                        I come from an Old English
                                     word without sex.

Facing a machine, not
            a plain or a field or a meadow or
            a forest, my derivation,
                         a sex I acquired sometime
                                      in the eighteenth century,
            flicks on a flat screen,

"Woman" itself has a curious history, which may be of some consolation to female readers,
 since it shows that they are not, linguistically at least, derivatives of the other sex"

Not necessarily wife plus man
            man plus object
                         skin plus armor

"Wolf + man," a sidebar utters,
             and I find myself thinking,
                          in angst with my skyscrapers,
             that's more like it.

 

Life Rings

Loosening ripe sinew
tendoned to deer bones,
life lays in strips
flopped over an aspen branch
mocking a plain's horizon.
The strips can hold shapes
like sailboats or penguins
imposed on cottony cumulus
easels. Instead of pulling
into nimbus wisps on the wind
they wrinkle like the old man's
forehead in the sun,
shrivel like question marks
that were once exclamations.

He feels his wife watching from behind tulip curtains,
wide hips pressed to an aluminum sink,
brewing coffee and warming
brown sugar and clover honey
lentils on the stove.
In the evening,
rose hip wine, home brew
of the nearest neighbor-
two miles on the gravel route
skirting the north cusp of the lake-
runs thick from a jug.
Sediment skims the bottom,
puffs a rosy cloud
when he sets it back down
beside the cold stove.
He sits alone, drinking
petals and remembering.


They both ate well, but only Loraine announced it through a body that kept warm all winter. He stood thin as paper rattling in the wind and like a moss-clad rock, she was the only thing that kept him from catching on a breeze. Once Loraine spent an entire September morning boiling jelly in
the kitchen. The sugary huckleberries rolled playfully in the pan, lava lapping over strata, and the hot liquid scent stretched across the patterned kitchen, each sweet molecule sweating it out, clear condensation misting the windows like breath on a pocket mirror. He stumbled in from the 
chopping block: a thick splinter had found its way into his left forearm. He squeezed with his right hand just above the wound to keep the flow of his heart from pumping onto the scuffed cedar floor. At the table where they will later eat, their heads almost touched, two hunched foxes in the brambles conspiring a rabbit for dinner. She smelled like huckleberry and dust and baby powder and she  wrapped his arm with gauze. Once he dripped on her apron and the color infused the small vertical stitches, It's alright, the huckleberry won't come out either, she said when he tried to apologize. Syrupy cadence of blood and huckleberry in the air, he forgot his pain for the amorphous beauty of it. Careful, careful, you don't need your blood moving any faster, she whispered and they kissed, pushing molecules toward the walls, candied jelly scalding the pot bottom black, a deep berry stain bleeding in the gauze.


The hunt infuses his thoughts
to the point where the white
bread of Truman's egg sandwich
quickens his finger
on the rifle trigger,
glowing undertail of a doe.
Truman drops the square target
in his lap and hoots
a few distinctly human verbalizations.
The next Tuesday he packs
ham on rusty brown rye.

Madrone leaves shivering
from an October chill
is the padding of fawn hooves
in a lichen dell,
swallows rustling hay
in the barn loft
is a doe tossing in sleep
twelve feet off the ground.


Before the time when they realized where riches came from they lived and fought in a tropic  basement of a feed store in town. His face appeared in Hunting & Game along with Harry Spicer and a robust buck with enough antlers to dress six mantles and the fighting stopped for a year.
They perched on the rims of their lives about to jump at the moment when fame or good fortune set in  then settled back into the oxalis and sword fern and learned to live in a square house and navy blue barn under the candelabra canopy of the old-growth forest.

Red cedar are long-lived (typically to 1,000
years), yet they are relatively slow growing,
not particularly prolific, and vulnerable to
fire because of thin bark. The widely
buttressed base of aged trees often becomes
hollow, but growth continues in outer tissues.

Dry mud crust on his boots
cracks irregularly like a snowflake
blooming around a buck shot
in the Chevy's windshield.
There is almost symmetry
in the haphazard way the shell warms,
cracks, and loosens its hold
on the tough leather and canvas,
falling in curved pieces
on the flickering hearth.

Like the boots, his feet feel empty.
Shells of skin encase blackness
where there once were taut pink tendons
and webbing of tiny bones
in the shape of a lady's hand fan
fluttering at her neck in an August rain forest church
as they spread religiously into toes.

Cross-sectioned at the ankle,
in growth rings
the years lay concentric
and ever thinner
as they squeeze inside a trunk
that no longer grows.
The forty rings of Loraine
are distinctly plump,
as if the veins were almost bursting
during the heavy rains and fattening sunlight.
Their selfish thickness
forces the outer rings thinner,
as if life could only contain
so many good years inside its rough skein.

Dead trees in fact support more forest life than the living. From the rich red mulch of fallen trunks burst sword fern, moss, lichen. The aerated softness becomes home to beetles, pill bugs, and katydids.

As the hunting seasons
end with the first snows
the fireplace is all that reminds
him of home. He writes
all he remembers of Loraine.
The paper smells alive,
like green light and huckleberries,
holds more than stories, more
than a forty-year marriage,
holds the life of Loraine,
reaching out through the scrawled black words.

***

The red cedars outside burn,
a hearth and a kitchen burn.
A tired, slumped skeleton burns.

The stones of the hearth are buried in the red crumble
and in the ferns and beetles that burst out,
the paper souls rest on spores,
skitter across fronds and into sunlight.