6
Wandering seabirds
ride the lower trellis of clouds.
Any halfway point is the hardest—
Not yet there, not able to rest.
Border Studies
5
A winding road
tracks the mountainside:
think of a multitude of hands
tunneling into a hard loaf of bread.
Border Studies
4
Above the lake, beyond
the mountain’s rim, the sun rises
and sets. In between: smoke plumes,
shut windows, catacombs of bells.
Border Studies
3
As her fingers worked she calculated
the yardage— What you have here,
she said as she patted each ball,
is the equivalent of four football fields.
Border Studies
2
The woman who sold me yarn
the color of burnt umber told me to wait
as she pulled the skeins apart, fastened
one end to the winding apparatus.
Border Studies
1
Who traced the shape of a nautilus
on the backs of these hills?
And how should we read the overlays:
metal on stone, on silt, on loam?
Meander
Before the road was a road,
where did it know to go?
How did the arrow
find its nervous trajectory,
and what energy did it gather
from the bow?
Follow your bliss: enter the bright-
lit cafe or museum doorway.
Some maps clearly mark
the exits we need;
others sport ink blots
in the shape of stray cats.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
[poem removed by author]
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Forget everything else, but remember the sound of what was said
“A saia com mancha
De flor carmesim
E os brincos da orelha
Fazendo tlintlin?”
[“Your skirt’s stained carmine
And your earrings are clinking,
Tlintlintlin?”]
~ from “A Annunciaçāo” by Vinicius de Moraes, trans. Natalie D’Arbeloff
Someone is cracking eggs in the kitchen, tapping the tines of the fork against a porcelain bowl, making a sound like a hard, bright light. I can see the cloudy marriage of the yolks and whites, the one hand steady and the other agog with its business of whisking—
And how is it in the room where a wake is in progress, where dark-suited relatives forced to acknowledge each other with curt nods take tight little bites of cake?
The widow is wearing her one good set of pearls: they adorn her ears and they lie against her throat, milky and cold like a string of teeth. Her cheekbones, chiseled like ice, sketch a small fortress: a chapel, an island, a distant retreat.
The aunt from the other side of the family comes up to where the daughters sit quietly in a row. She stops in front of one child, touches her streaky cheek and says absently Ah, this one, this is the real beauty… Years from now, who will remember how her eyes looked, and how they paired with her cloying falsetto?
In response to Via Negativa: House without walls....
Queen Anne’s Lace
No one told us they weren’t regal
as the name they came by, weren’t
connected in some way to pedigree—
And so mother planted stands of them
around the garden after plots of grass
were rolled out, and borders marked
with quarry stone— Wild carrot, tufted
bird’s nest, belled hoops of devil’s plague.
I cupped their flimsy skirts in my hands
and tugged them, loosening a rain
of tiny seed pearls from this common
weed, looking for the bud in the middle,
the one they said was tinted red
from when the lady pricked her finger
with a needle, making all this lace.