Mama & i, we talk to plants, for
we are short girls close to the ground
& speech is the golden miracle—;
i learn to write while she says honey (making a fire-pouch
in the y ) to a speckled
banana whose existence is energy broth.
To limp chrysanthemums she says Come on & drops
a Bayer aspirin in; i curve our letters near a cholla
after it lent some needles to my leg—
We’re not good relaxers, childhood & i,
we suffer a leafy need while God is a missing
hypotenuse. We’ll not a dreaded dandelion meet
before her voice arrives at low violets.
In summer, when spicy seeds escape so fine
a pepper tree to make sashay for the lahn-ger-ay drawer,
we speak to spices they put on Jesus,
those poor bright spices staring in the dark…
He hath numbered every hair on your head, she said,
meaning she hath numbered the hairs…
when we are out with our strangeness
in the west— she in her desert, i on a mountain
crouching near Lilium parvum
with the same amount of frail our mother feels,
—it will be quiet for a while but syllables
are there: inside a leaf, a syllable,
inside a syllable, a door—
The lining of the real is infinite & that
is where we live, & humans
don’t give up when dreams are momentarily
sundered… like Gogol’s overcoat, like hope,
the cloth of that transforming everything-
i mean the lining of that dream…
This morning juncos with black wedges, black
hoodies in the nervous dawn…
Solstice approaches, the children
arrive at the end of an awful year,
grandmothers peek at them inside their beds,
there, not so terrible now, there they are
beside the winter dusk… pale pink lights
lift in the malls, humans trying to make
the living wage, in their loved
& unloved skins, brown, black,
pink, beige, white, marked, scarred, inked
pierced skins, buying objects for each other
…desert children doubt the winter holidays.
My childhood Jesus lived inside a cactus, magic
liquid streaming from his hands- the soul as
causeless love. On winter hills bands of scrubby
sunburst lichen eating lingam in the mist,
a beetle, the cells of its vision over gold,
its labor not labor if it doesn’t think so
nor Xanthoria break-
ing things down, “fairly common on bark…”
if you peel a piece of it from history
the rest continues—
Imagen de portada: Franz Marc, Deer in the monastery garden (1912). Dominio público.