Anniversary

Twenty sweet years or mostly
not to mention the occasional evening split

by cool stars remote and separate above the house
or somebody’s willowed tears, the weeks

rained over us, beyond us even
in drought the wick of our youth

burned steadily down into our bodies.
There is no hiding the love we’ve sewn

into the squared quilt of this marriage—
long blue nights stitched into days full

or difficult or ordinary like the dozen
tiny wrens on the wire this fresh morning.

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Hillcrest Drive, Albuquerque

There was the front walk, hot cement
leading past the pebbled landscape
a fringe of scratchy junipers
with their blue poison orbs.
There were the double front doors
of dark wood which might open
to a living room
where no one lived, arched
and obedient furniture matching
the imperious dining room table
whose water rings boiled
our mother to a rage.
There were sliding glass doors
along the concrete back porch
where we could see the neighbor’s yard
and their small springing dog
on his thin tether
whom they surely loved more
than our parents loved us.
There was the fall of seventh grade
when mononucleosis wore me down
to utter nothing, closed my throat
and flung me into sweaty nightmares
one where I saw my sleeping sister
sawed in half on wooden planks
by anonymous workers
in the neighbor’s garden.
I fevered awake at dawn and stood
a long time staring through the paned glass
to the vacant day outside, everyone’s yard
cool and quiet, the relentless New Mexican sun
not yet burning the day into submission.
And me, in a large empty house
all of thirteen and shivering
with a strangled swollen neck
powerless to swallow my own spit.

((forthcoming) reprinted with kind thanks from The Portland Review)

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Lies

The sun is a broken window on fire.
The stars speak the color of my real name.
Angels whisper Osama Osama in their sleep.
The dog’s bones gleam in the dark.
The dark is the underside of God’s one eyelid.
Hearts are like the sun only not on fire
Or do I mean not like a window
Or do I mean green glass you can see through?

Truths

There is a river of grief beneath the world.
Horses remember the rumble of dinosaurs.
My boy grew an inch in less than a month.
My husband was a boy once with a poem in his pocket.
Bales of sweet grass wear down in the barn
to give room to the cat, to give room
to the mice.
Under the lake there are turtles. Under the lake
there are mysteries. The lake knows
all about the river of grief.

(reprinted with thanks from PoemMemoirStory, Spring 2003)