to hold vertical lines

while something at the center branches,

and keeps deciding,

and keeps asking which way,

and it knows where the light comes from.

And remaining light is its own gravity—

a joy in knowing the price of joy,

that hums this low and stubborn note

from the low and stubborn cellar

of the low and stubborn still-alive—

it’s the way a string keeps singing

after the hand and stick have lifted.

There is a logic to resemblance:

the brain's ventricles hold their still water.

The breast tissue, removed then placed on cloth,

look like two eyes that have stopped seeing.

and my delirium

my joy are lifting

and rising, and lifting —

Maybe the city finally folded itself

into the long green hill, or the flat lands—

the roads at last surrendered to rain,

the banners sad, forgot the names

we stitched into them by lantern light.

Our grandmother in her seventies,

bent to the thistle, tugging,

the sun hammering the desert

into its final making—

and her, still prosecuting weeds.

The Reason . . .

It sits in our silence.

A hum so low in my pocket,

A note uncaptured in the air.

But I keep returning to one

who hides her whole year

as a dead thing —

thin stems, grey as death,

unread against the creosote

until the night opens her

like a secret kept so long

it became her sex’s secret.

There is a bird that keeps its song

past the falling day —

not because of its courage

but because it has forgotten

what the silence means.

Come and take what's left.

I am now awaiting you.

I have been practicing this

my whole life.

The earth dances.

I know this.

I watch it from the edge

where I keep going back

to see if this time

the thing in the wind

is something other than

the thing in the wind.

VI.

There are creatures —

I can scarcely hold the full weight of it —

who hate the very vessel

that cracked open

and gave them their first breath,

who take the compass of compassion

a woman pressed into their chest

and use it to find their way

back to her throat.

Perhaps you are already here —

wearing a white man’s clothing,

your eyes no longer black

but blue from a ransomed country.

As I am poured

into a white woman’s skin,

my eyes gone green

with the translation.

And I will sit beside the open window

while dawn unbuttons all its dreadful light,

feeling my life drip slowly through the hour

like rainwater escaping through a crack.

Love once passed through me

like warm weather through a valley —

it shaped the land,

then went on.

One dim hour folds into another dim hour.

One disappointment closes its eyes

as its child opens its own.

One face practicing its lying

rehearses in the mouth of the next.

I have the birds not asking my name,

the sun dropping its gold into my hair—

I have this solitary, difficult, exacting thing.

I have the animal world, wild and free,

whose many faces open like an invitation:

witnesses asking for nothing back.