Archives for May 2016

I bought hanging stars made of sticks and twigs, painted pewter and gun-
metal with red ribbons to hang on my tree. Silver antlers the size

of my thumb, small enough for a Gaulish god, and gold deer too,
antlered animals: stags, fawns (budding), elk. When I got back to the inn,

I heard those strange Parisian police sirens on the tv. My room thick
with pine pitch and fire and something burning: a sweet offering of meat.

1. Dead so long, you can see right through them. The branches fell first, then the crown, then the bark sloughed off like snakeskin, and the cores collapsed, leaving suggestions of strong columns spun upward in helix fashion. Below the shifting leaf litter and sand, roots entwine with limestone. What’s left has put on the pocked and scored look of karst, but a tree remains a tree.

2. Dead, but still intact, this one has some juice for chalk-white fungi spiraling around its trunk. Shelves for tree frogs, pale question marks, frilled platters for dolls.

3. Still alive, this one ripped the floor with it. New name: windthrow. Had something loosed its anchorage and prepared it to let go? A hole opens in the canopy, saplings stuck in the pole stage wake. The earth that ripped with the tree, once part of a forest floor, now named a tip-up mound.

4. Pine cone. Alone on the floor, waiting for a fire to free its seeds. So it can start over.

Alienation
standing heavy in the kitchen
before NASA liftoff,

then falling vertiginously
holding both hands

in retrospect, a slight exchange
of rubble and dust

through smoked glass
clots of dried shampoo,
writhing in view
of silver repute.

Dots detach.
Speech impediment: glottal 1.
Meltdown.

Is this normal?

—Roswell, NM

In the tarpaulin of dream, you’re in and then out. Later, you’re waking late. The porcelain sky all shot up with grackles and it’s 11 am. The swamp cooler ticks in the window where the motel curtains stay pulled against the clatter cart of the maid. Outside, the land’s hide stretches hard under a washed out sky. You get the feeling the grass fires are just waiting. Somewhere, lightning hovers in an unknown thought, ready to strike. A few billboards up the road, after the huevos rancheros, you pull off at the UFO Museum. The road moves under the heat. An afternoon with aliens seems good at this point. You’ve just visited your uncle who lives nearby. He sleeps at night hunting dogs in his mind. Guns everywhere, one under his pillow and the bullets he makes himself. His land: a vacuum of prairie and antelope and two miles of barbed wire fence. You look at the hairless bodies in the glass cases and feel the eyes on you from the security guard. Maybe it’s the way you look. Or the bad check you wrote last night for the room. Still, there are these grasslands. They swell and wave and the dusky sky slices them right where they crest. When you leave, you see the maps of alien worlds and think of how someone plotted them. And then about your temporary home two hundred miles away and the one road that gets you back.