POEMS & ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Prelude
Someone breathed into my ear
The vapor of the dead
It woke me up, I was asleep
It circled round my head
It all comes back inchoate
The meaning has no base
I never learned to love someone
The way I did that place
2. The Estate
Down past the River Road
In the lowest hollow
I took the path along the row
No stranger dared to follow
The wide lawn was overgrown
The eaves were bowed and brown
The window showed that every room
Was bare and white as bone
Above the pool, a mirrored gaze
I saw her ivied face
Her empty eyes, cold, recessed
Have watched this wasted place
Where dying bloom and creeping vine
Strangle and adorn
The place that built inside of me
A soul, a ghost, a home
The field has breath, the pond a voice
I’ve known since I was small
They told me then to leave this place
Or stay and lose it all
3. The Barn
“You who live outside of life,
you’re not alone, not yet”
In the barn, the ghost, the girl
When I came home from school
She sat upon the hayloft stairs
In a dress of layered tulle
Half-hidden from the shadows
Her body turned away
Her little gloves, pale and clenched
Over her little face
It was as if she took my hand
It was as if she knew
The earth held only part of her
And I should know it too
I’d seen the man out in the field
Immersed in dancing flames
A barn had once burned down out there
Long before we came
The land stretched wide beyond the house
Who knows what lay beneath
What other men were lying there
And would show themselves to me
It was as if he took my hand
It was as if he knew
The earth held only part of him
And I should know it too
It was as if they caught my ear
It was as if their breath
Would say, would sing
The dance of life continues after death
4. The Guest
She left our house in the dead of night
My sister went to find her
We didn’t know why she left
She’d fled as fast as fire
All this time I was asleep
While my sister chased her down
I picture them out in the woods
On the other side of town
It turns out she was lost and caught
Deep within her dreams
Which guided her out of our house
Like Joan called from her wheel
But no glory there awaited her
No god where she was found
On a patch of snow in a lonely copse
On the frozen moonlit ground
5. The Slaughterhouse
The house of stone
With a concrete floor
A ring stuck at its center
Stood up the hill
From the spring-fed pond
We’d skate on every winter
In the past these family farms
Slaughtered all their stock
I’d seen it once at another farm
And I never will forget
The ring was used
To hold them still
The nose ring in the ring
The pond was there
To drag them down
Dead but still bleeding
Why hadn’t they torn it down
When the farms no longer thrived?
Beneath our blades a reef of beasts
Lay lowing under ice
6. The Girl
The woods behind that sprawling farm
Above that ranging home
Was somewhere no one ever went
Unless to be alone
The wrens would sing, the grouse would fly
A fox a flash of red
A peaceful place of moss and flowers
In an untouched woven bed
Who was that girl that entered there
Who crossed that thorny turf?
She brought with her just rope and will
To end her time on earth
We didn’t know her face or name
Just rendered in our minds
But the birds would sing the strangest song
As we rode by on our bikes
7. The Swan
Do you know
The swan in the swamp?
Do you remember
How she screamed?
A truck backed up
Beyond the road
Where she lay alone
Asleep
The twilight had just
Descended
That hour that fools
The eye
The night before
I’d seen her there
A girl of snow
And ice
The whitened wings
Unfurled
As the wheels
Destroyed her bed
The ivory neck
Extended
Like a finger
For its band
She lay there quiet
Against the grass
A splayed and shattered
Thing
Of red and white
Green and gold,
Undone
Embroidery
8. The Witch
I saw the witch out in the woods
As we sang around the fire
Stooped and white, curled and dry
A bone enrobed in briar
No one else had seen her there
No one saw her face
Which stared at me, fixedly
Grim and unafraid
I left them all to sing their songs
By the fire’s dying glow
The woods and field enclosing camp
Like hands around a throat
Back at home I lay awake
Safe behind my door
Listening for her muted steps
In the shadowed yard below
And though the time has passed
I still see her in those trees
The world is now those darkened woods
The days her eyes on me
I was so young, had barely lived
But I recognized the fear
Was what lay waiting, out of view
In all our older years
9. The River
On the banks
The wash so brown
The shadows blue
They’re black
I saw the form
Astride the loam
Splayed out upon
Its back
A bear, a dog
A bed, a log
A child’s eyes
Are pure
Until the hands
Of the missing man
Were clear against
The dew
The river’s flow
A blackened bow
That tied around
Our town
Had sapped his life
Like a lantern’s light
Buried
Underground
10. The Speakers
“I’m sorry,” said the blade,
Poised above the hare,
“The life you have inside of you
is only yours to share.”
“In some ways,” said the night,
as it blotted out the day,
“The fact that you will soon return
makes your death a sadder thing.”
“I hear you,” said the hay,
the soured, dusty straw,
“You are the holy, crying child
the world believes is gone.”
“Leave it,” said the leaf,
“The edge of me turns brown,
I die and rise invisibly
Like the ghosts you won’t allow.”
11. The Orchard
The trees held bells
The chimes the blooms
Each fruit a tongue
To taste the bruise
The bending bough
Upended how
We’d try to steal
What it allowed
This was our greed
And was its gift
We raised the thing
That died to give
12. The Song
No Go No
The throat of the bird would sing
Don’t you hear it too?
The field was echoing
No So Low
The flying, slicing wing.
It says that there is beauty
Inside your suffering
Go Go Go
The feathered head will turn
And look away, though now the song
Will live inside your room
13. The Past
The meadow lost its golden hue
The trees let go their leaves
The air grew colder, cleaner, blue
Pale as centuries
Someone breathed into my ear
The vapor of the dead
It woke me up, I was asleep
It circled round my head
It all comes back inchoate
The meaning has no base
I never learned to love someone
The way I did that place