Barbed water 7x10

Barbed Water Argus House Press

Barbed Water JR Toriseva

copyright Š 2017 by JR Toriseva All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America Argus House Press is an independent, Midwestern press.

Barbed Water was selected by Shane McCrae for an open manuscript contest.

Argus House Press PO Box 1854 Stow, Ohio 44224 ISBN 978-1-943281-25-1 Managing Editor: Teneice Durrant Cover Design: Pam Swarts www.argushousepress.com

Barbed Water Acknowledgements “Absence” in 6x6x2016, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY “Arsenic Fountain” in Sugar Hill Review.

“Benchmark of Water”, Winner of Winter in Variations: Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, Writers Rising Up to defend place, natural habitat, wetlands.

“Buttonhole, Chain, Satin Stitch I” was published as “Buttonhole, Satin Stitch” in Descant.

“Budge” in 6x6x2016, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY “Burdock Shrine” and “Carriage” in The Citron Review.

“Case of Water” in CutBank online.

“Crossing”, Winner of Winter in Variations: Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, Writers Rising Up to defend place, natural habitat, wetlands.

“Dart”, Winner of Winter in Variations: Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, Writers Rising Up to defend place, natural habitat, wetlands.

“Delta Perimeter” in Cobalt.

“Dig” in The Adirondack Review.

“Encyclopedia of Grass” was published in Best Canadian Poetry 2008 and Fiddlehead.

“Lure” “Absence’ in 6x6x2016, Rochester Contemporary Art Center, Rochester, NY “Moon Minnow: Exodus, Amend” in an earlier version as “Exodus: Amend” in CutBank online.

“Helix” in Prime Number.

“Ice Gait: Pond at Rites” in Saranac Review.

“Ice Out” in CutBank online.

“Induce”, in an earlier version, in Nimrod, as “Fabric Store”.

“Invitation to the Pond” in Radar Poetry.

“Library of Sound” in Cutbank Literary Journal, selected by Oliver de La Paz as the winner of the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry 2016.

“Mobile Fringe” in The Literary Review.

“Mother of the Pond” in Cutbank Literary Journal, selected by Oliver de La Paz as the winner of the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry 2016.

“Pond at Rites”, in a different version, was published as “Dandelion Rites” in the anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sound, City Lights, San Francisco, 2008.

“Retrofitted Page” in Sugar Hill Review.

“Rime” in JACKET. “Self Identification” in Fulcrum.

“Settle & Submerge” in Saranac Review.

“Swarm” in Hot Metal Bridge, and featured as a ‘Voice’ in Literary Review Online, in conjunction with the print publication of “Mobile Fringe.”

“Spill: Reverse” in The Malahat Review.

“Syllable” in Cutbank Literary Journal, selected by Oliver de La Paz as the winner of the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry 2016.

“Talking in Snow”, Winner of Winter in Variations: Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, Writers Rising Up to defend place, natural habitat, wetlands.

“Tengo Sueño” in Prick of the Spindle.

“Turtle” in The Cincinnati Review.

“Translation” in Prime Number.

“Perceive”, Winner of Winter in Variations: Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, Writers Rising Up to defend place, natural habitat, wetlands.

“Pleasure Garden, Body Craft”, in a different version, was originally published in 14 Hills as “Body Craft: Frankenstein”.

“Unknown Things About Rain” in CutBank online “Visitation Pyre” in CutBank online.

“Water Mechanics” in CutBank online.

“Winter, December #73”, Winner of Winter in Variations: Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest, Writers Rising Up to defend place, natural habitat, wetlands.

Dedication

Contents The Museum of Water Floor Plans for Water Moss Called Pond Translation Syllable Floor Plans for Water Turtle The Retrofitted Page Encyclopedia of Grass Swarm Inside, Away Boiled Invitation to the Pond Settle & Submerge Absence Library of Sound Quill Thistle Dig Scrutiny Perceive Buttonhole Satin Stitch 1 Mobile Fringe Delta Perimeter Benchmark of Water Estate, Unseasoned Beacon Carriage Water Mechanics Case of Water Book, the Pond Burdock Shrine At Table, Blank Wedding Mother of the Pond Induce Glisten, Glimmer, Gleam Dart Spill: Reverse Fractured Muse Arsenic Fountain Pleasure Garden, Body Craft

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Talking in Snow: A Short History of Sound Rime Broken Equation Tengo SueĂąo Ice Gait: Pond at Rites Crossing Winter Mallowed Axis Visitation Pyre Ice Museum Anointed How to Melt Chassis Scheduled Charm Moon Minnow: Exodus, Amend Timing of Mud Teach March Ice Out Watershed Unknown Things About Rain Helix Mud Story Deck Dirge Dream Hiatus May, Queen of Ditch & Sewer Self Identification Lure Budge Rushed

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

Barbed Water

Moss Called Pond This is not a book of brackish water. Before lichen, I was pond.

Located far, but not so distant, from here.

If you walked west fifteen days or drove three hours you’d find them.

They’d shadow you, on the prairie. The tall bloated matchsticks, straight nuclear silos in the middle of the wheat fields. Mnemosyne, large rockets full, not of grain, but of uranium or something from deep inside the earth. nothing that is gathered from the skirt and those silos are meant to destroy deep in the belly of North America on the flat fields of wheat, oat, flax and rye, they wait all through hot summer, sentinels of fear.

Uncracked by winter, unvisited by trumpeter swans.

Here, in this deep pool of water, all that is far away.

Dense woods right and left. Moss top. Mud bottom.

Here we swing and are shattered. Here we have companions, water.

Here we have screens. Here we are buttoned. Here we have proof of sleep.

Translation A year in minnows, a year spent fighting extinction, a year around the edges, a year underwater, a year spent lodged in the muddy bottom of it all, a year watching for the egg, a year waiting for hatching, a year in flight, in transit, in Venus a year in view, a year looking up through the looking glass of pond, a year spent in shallow water, looking down.

This yellow-rumped warbler, she speaks swan. These are the only visitors The ones who come after the trumpets. The ones who say they can teach the swans the migration route, lost for some reason to deep memory.

Or perhaps they are just too curious to follow the deep migration routes, perhaps they hear the whispers of some other sort of routing, one that spells doom and the end of their line, to be sure.

Nonetheless loud, insistent, a clamoring drownable by no blood.

Regardless of threat to life, it calls to them. Once unfocused, who else would follow the airplane dressed as the mother trumpeter?

Who else would mistake feathers for silicon and steel?

Who else would read the hieroglyphs of migration as stagnant? There is not much company here; only the cows with their wooden shoes. Only me, with my fixed labors. Me, with my botched migration Me, with my deviled heart.

2

Syllable Unseated, the pond is the place to rest, a place to hole up, a way in, a place to hold out, a way out, a place to remember that other life form, a place to float outside of the migratory self. It is the gift of water.

It is the gift of deep, though not ocean, nor sea monster.

I set my cubed self against the cat tail.

I walk a horseshoe, rest an oval as deep as ferns¸ as bottomless as high grass.

Here is the envelope of water.

Here is the signet, the fold and the stamp.

This pond fits the letter.

This pond fastens the seal.

Here I send self to self, keeping the lines light in my hand; I sight the serpent, seeing the stories shed, watching the end bite the beginning, hereafter to heretofore, furthermore to evermore, amazement to amazement, tooth to nipple, claw to lip, and later, the again to the again.

3

Floor Plans for Water

The soul shaker ferries here. Ventriloquist, I have grown a room under the surface. For myself, I draw the inner water house, mud hearts, marble hands. I dust backwards. I polish the pond; There is a house in the pond. The dwarf birch attic window glints at me. Usually closed, tonight it has been left open.

The star water lilies live there. Mobile static cannot intrude.

I polish Venus. I cook dinner for Mercury and the pond.

Invite them over, bear their soul. There will be winter raspberries. There will be cold fresh cream. I tell them.

Come quickly. They do not arrive. I sew four rows of sequins on a sheer scarf. I shelve marble. I draft coins. I stir water.

I wait for no one. Here, alone, buried deep. Carried. Voices drawn. Voices loud. Voices over voices. I carry currency.

Numerically solid, seismically done, I walk until my feet go glint, my head fuzzy, my hands pocketed in sphagnum moss.

The pond, small, but here. A minute, lopsided oval.

Carefully calibrated, how can standing in the presence of water melt the salt in my mouth? Shine the eyes. Wet the contours of the soul? My hands become minnows. My heart a water lily, a crooked aster, a currant’s breath. My ears are fresh water snails My thighs are cattails. Bent. Magnified. Majestic.

There is so much more of me in pond.

My reflection grows triptych. Voices loud.

Intonation off. Voices driven. Voices drawn.

Voices drown in the teacup of pond. There is a house in pond. Afloat and on fire, the house internal. The house adrift.

4

Turtle Pond, I visit you every day. I come and breathe in water.

When I am not at this latitude, at night you send me letters on the back of my eyelids. Messages of water transcribe my dreams.

This is the way to float through life. This is the place where the roots grow deep. This is the mud of night and vision. This is the instrument of the bat’s aria, of the musical spelling of dusk. The pond is the bow.

The practice is elephants. The low combing of the hair, wrapped in twigs at the pond. The pond zips up my mind. Here is the thread of music that follows my sock line. Here is where the boots are buttoned. I walk into the text of marsh and swamp of wet plants and floating algae.

I walked into the scribing of insects, the deep fingernail clam. The calling of wood frogs, the blue-yolked trill. A new oak grows in the crotch of the old oak. Why is it lodged here? Why did the pond start? The roots will take over the old tree. Pleat and tuck. That’s the way it is with woods.

Congregate and assemble. Call and Response.

Gather and be gathered. Bunch up and fold away. Come and go.

5

The Retrofitted Page Horned Larks sew the wind. August at the pond, the crowd greets me.

Sideways and straight ahead, the cat tails puff brown, crumble in my hands, puckered from washing cucumbers.

Canning late, the whites of my eyes burn green, pickle-brined retinas, dill weed beans; mustard seeds dot my cells. I float like fennel, marked by half-moons of onions, studded with the occasional clove. I cut cobs and freeze corn beyond midnight, passing two a.m. once, twice. Cotton sticks to my back, sweat ribs my breasts. My mind taken with garden: the garden to the side of the house, the garden at the back of the house, the garden five hundred feet before the barn.

I have cabbages to guard, rows of green beans to pick, tomatoes to slice, kohlrabi to pull, the chard pushing itself to flower.

Preservation, but I have no time. Always, August leads to January. I have to put up food for the long, lonely months of winter. Already the leaves scatter The ridge of frost heaves points to autumn. I remember: bunchberry, currant, wintergreen. Snow changes everything.

I stay up and boil, press the seals of plastic bags, screw jar lids on tight, pray for the safe seal while comets blur the sky, and the aurora borealis is only a kiss.

6

Encyclopedia of Grass Here in the window of grass back and forth, visual grammar up and down, omni-poetics, hymn of bees Within the whorls of milkweed resting on the white tips of the root system, the prairie fire blew across and held the burn here, not quite telepathic because it had something to do with the communication between root hairs something to do with the negative space of prairie dog burrows heedless of prairie chickens, once caught this would go on for miles, for forests, for countries once caught, this transferred underground past the missile silos a sore throat, a split thumb a missile in the middle of all that land grasshopper tea for supper, empty space a desert-save for the grass holding down the top soil: the sun was saying something, was singing something, was demanding something: give me your tongue, give me your day I don't want your excuses, your indeterminations, your missteps give me your big dream the grass studied the word the grass worried the definitions stood by the blade of the phrases sod bunk sod dreams sod stew cut windows in the sod sew windows in the sod freeze windows in the sod grass seed contortions of grass a diorama of grass 7

the grass museo the cinema of grass grass gesture grass kinesis grass pantomime only the voice of grass is absent grass a silent movie without the disruption of a tree, of anything taller than the grass. arrested grass joy in the close whispering of grass seven feet underground cry for the long gone winter the cavalier spread the musketeer repetition found somewhere in the morning the graft that shapes time the splint that makes history the weft that determines what is seen looking back, talking back, moving backwards, diving in.

8

Swarm

Two bees fence before us, foils reversed. Mouths stained powdered orange, t-shirts ripped from fighting; scabby armed, we gulp Tang in scratched blue plastic glasses, spy the neighbor through the wire gridded safety of the screen door as he carries bee boxes in that slow bee man way. One bee passes the man who hung upside down on his green-planked porch. We’d watched gravity defeated before, but only in snowy black and white glass rectangles wheeled into our classroom. One bee rests.

Not up close, not some friend who lived two fields and one thin forest away, not from someone who told us stories, just down the gravel road, past the white pines, feared for sheltering deer during hunting season. Ankles cuffed in a silver catalog contraption, defying gravity in front of the painted white boards, green trim of the farm house he’d been born in, this Norwegian bachelor who read plants like books, who bred White Bleeding Hearts and sheltered Showy Lady Slippers, the white petals sitting on the streaked pink pouch, the hairy oval leaves clasping stem, who taught us kindness, and a sturdy way of looking on, in, longer, deeper. Suited like an Apollo astronaut Paul Tagnjerd strumming the papered channels as if they were a Django guitar instead of hexagonal house. Even knowing he would get stung, we could not avert our eyes. His boots scraping gravel, his hand holding sure fire, gently requesting our father not shoot deer on his property, gently showing us what it was not to be afraid of bees. Honeycomb of Ice, Skep of Heaven, Bowl of Water. God Bee, Wasp Deceiver.

One bee is noble, feeding the infant God. In swarm, the bee mass fear, pursuing the common good. St. Ambroce of the wicker step, this bee far older than its keeper Sophocles, Xenophone, Lucan, St. Basil, Democritus pleading to be buried in a bath of honey. Bees feeding an abandoned Pindar as he slept on the slope of Mt Hymettus. Bees dropped honey into Plato’s mouth. Bee nourishment.

Into this hive of water, the bees buzz. Numbered and numbering. The pond is an anemone clock where the day changes manually. The bee bore the book, pocked the font, punctured the page according to the inclinations of the silver minnows and the rain. The law according to hive.

9

Inside, Away Though never saying anything, this pond has always believed in me. So, I am allowed to live with water.

I draw water from the pond, in my jar it behaves, settling into its components. Moss tendril floating in the middle band of light brown. Floating egg. Blades of grass.

Scum battling the busking wood chip. Something wet inside me. The week I thought I couldn’t make it through, makes it through me somehow whole and holy, living on land, breathing on water, walking with pool, floating on field, this cup of water becomes the whole pond. In my life, in my mind, in my pocket, on my window sill. All here. All healed. All accounted for. All counted. All now.

All present. All whole. All near. I make a whole world out of it: asleep, awake, walking, in the house or in the city the water touches me, kisses my spine slowly and rolls down.

10

Boiled I’ve memorized this pond. After friending me on Facebook, I navigated the URLs until I found this spot. I swept into this sweet water.

Since then, I’ve learned how to breath. Underwater while walking all aspects of land. My arms know where I, like the pond, freeze over.

Held up by gills, I remain afloat on the gravel road. The water has not disappeared in me, the pond remains whole; here will be no absorbing here.

The pond nods at my break away. I do the back crawl down the ditch, scissor kick up the gravel road and breast stroke past the driveway.

On land, I swam in the same way I act when the teacher raises his voice and asks a question. Being me, being pond, being water in a wrap-around shell, the only person in the entire room that knows the answer is me. However, I don’t answer the question. Telling tempts. Can’t answer it because my voice is speaking underwater and the teacher can only hear where there is no water and my on-land voice is just too far away to get to; so I tread, instead, my wrists flowing in and out like the wings of a blue jay.

My eyes to the left, looking out the window, my left side so close to the radiator that there are grill marks. Outside the glass, far away, lies the pond.

Stirring itself to sleep in the day, I shut my eyes and murmur lullabies to water, in water; far away, but held so close we dream each other’s dreams in the tripwire of the pond.

11

Invitation to the Pond Seeking shelter, a grandmother and the small girl lay in the ditch, against the gentle, grass shoulder of the pond. standing up blue hung in the sky where the tail of the tornado had torn air. The farmer opposite started his tractor and raked another row. The girl looked back at the pond, ran her eyes over the still water. Below the surface --a table and chairs set for a tea party for ten. Waiting for her? Reserved Previously?

Set for the future? Still, she could not decide. Hearing her grandmother’s Soles on the gravel, she followed behind her foot step in foot step, up the road.

12

Settle and Submerge Check the margin. This pond is the only photograph I have of myself. Scry water so generous, that even this cup magnifies itself into multitude, mires me to font, giving my tongue ocean instead of puddle. Transcribed, the solid salt of plurality allows me to float. Snap the picture, I had planned on recording the minuscule changes of the pond in and out of water. Looking at surface, being with the pond in a three dimensional shore dwelling sort of way. Strung. Electing daily the blood sugar of water. Beyond buoyancy, my first thought was to send vertical to click Not constant, he might not secure any sort of balanced, focused snap. This pond is my boiling point soup pot, my summer of snow, my ship, my crow’s nest set at two feet above pond level, soft as an unlaced camisole, supple as an undone scarf. The pond as torn rag, as hour glass, as bowed silver of a trumpet lip. The pond as pirate, as sail, as tea port. The pond as treasure chest, as spoon, as stackable conch. The pond spins like an orange lifesaver, my hand of glory, taut knot, broken plate. The pond as unmailed letter, a split sphere, a lost concertina. The pond scroll, gold coin, connect the dot; the pond anchors docks.

This pond is a rescue boat. The pond my tarot deck, my gazing bowl; pond as slipped button, as spit pearl, as porthole. Focused.

Not so far from the pond the beaver sits at the crystal bowl on the bottom of the dams in the fork of the Clearwater River. Backs split the fescue water, bellies strum in the sunned water. Plant. This boreal pond is too small for that, though.

As fingernail clams strum the bottom, wood frogs call and the mustard beetle, on its Saskatoon back, does it best. I wanted a true confession, but all that answers is this unspoken map: whisper, ripple back, time surfaced, waves convening, sun on bank, set on recondite spire. The pond is the deepest part.

13

The pond is a secret self. This pond is a portal. The only thing said is sinking water, a language known for its underside, resistance to pebbles, ability to drown, and then revive, pure flotation & reserve.

14

Absence Stalked, pink tattoos the water lilies here and there.

Pageant. The pond a circle of light, the source below, the open pool above. Cavalcade. This pool is the cup I hold, but do not drink. Excused, Gone-Away Lake: the pond knew before I did, determined it with calibration. Measured and notated, like a rock thrown into its liquid center records the dive. Summoned, it signaled and added the information like another rock in its bottom layer, just another rock in the pool base of sediment. Writ. The pond is like that. This is the lost pond. This is the smallest atom outside of myself. Beckoned, I lost the pond.

Walking out by the road there was only pasture. The indentation was there, yes, but only an eye of grass, smooth like the small polished sesame. No mud iris. Gauged. No speckled vein the pond had moved long gone, maybe far away gone, obviously. Measured. But what sort of gone I did not know: gone for good, gone over night, gone fishing. I hoped it was the be back soon sort of gone. Not the long gone, gone. Quota. Not the gone four days before saying goodbye for that long time sort of gone. Measured.

The gone of the vanished. The departed. The consumed.

15

Library of Sound Velvet books, dropped in water, float up, ink held.

The pond grows greener every day, algaed surface, on gravel the bindweed closes in over the arch. Tlitlizin, so far North, I should be dream walking instead of swimming, so I stay awake at the edge.

Iliad, the journey round the pond. Iliad underground. Iliad underneath. Ulysses in utero.

The babies always came in system. It is the looped sistus.

Wyrd’s volcanic cauldron, Freyja’s oaken keep.

What is held in space, in water? What keeps us checked in: in time, in line, in rhythm?

Checked out of Dante’s purgatory. Clocked in Dante’s heaven.

Hell bled out in the field overlays, caught in the swath of hay, the cut of wheat, the sheaves over the ditch, the gravel strewn with silage, in the phosphorous scent of summer, the words become water, shrouding me with symbols, caressing me with lines.

I sleep in syllable. I lie in rhyme.

16

Quill Not so far now, immersion near, floor the engine. Crunch of gravel, axle hitting ditch, tires squealing past cowslips, chassis down, her eyes, through the glass, the swipe of a hand brushing the paper, the hands on the wheel, leaving burnt rubber, the hissing of air beneath, sets the Bobolink. Taught to grow straight and tall, a white gladiolus in a black garden, I showed the pond how to sing from its diaphragm: tongue soft, throat open, belly emitting the deep sound. I was invited in. Where in the surface is the mirror, the water sweet with bees? The air set with insects, No see ‘ems, Stick Walker, the Evaporator. Who lives here when I’m gone? Who lifts the veil of water when I leave? This bowl of water is my Genesis, my number line, my antidote to revelation. This is where I stop time and no destruction can touch me or the grasses as they bend in the wind. Here we are in safe hollow.

Here we rest before we run from inside monsters and outside angels. This pond is not the place for perch. Deep water isn’t the cold habitat Northerns require.

Quill, the only fish that flash here are the thin tailed minnows spawned by rings of frogs or cries of crows, the kind of fish that can be carried on plume, ink, and wire.

17

Thistle

Hop Scotch: the kind of plant that seeds itself, the serrated green year after year the purple whirring.

The Docked Canadian Thistle, the kind of plant that keeps itself close attaching to everything that passes near in trek or forage taking advantage of the wire hair of dogs, the soft furry flank of the Belgian farm horse, the red and white legs of heifers and mats on the incandescent hair of sows. This is the kind of plant that dines on the sides of others, a prayer of endurance, a breath of fortitude.

Burdock: she sat down on the front step and waited, the rain soaked the heart on the front of her purple shirt this pond has forsaken its mother, father, sisters, brothers.

Thieves’ water, the instant when her lids shut as a grey Bronco makes the gravel shudder, the inner lining of her eye quivers, branded on the water; she floats by. She sets ahead.

18

Dig Life one long row to weed. The corn parallel, all these tassels, all these bees churn the hot hum of growth. The field ends only when I turn around and see pond. My life one long, crooked row broken only by replication of the pond. Hands cracked with dirt.

Feet bending over the onion stalks. The hollow stem, the release of sharp, white scent over the tilled rows. The pharmacognosic nature of August.

The plastic bag folded over the top of the box. A red handprint on a green trash can. The lavender teddy, the red and black gorilla, the orange balloon knotted around the crown, the silver flash of the circle, the loop of the grey scarf, the flag divided yellow and green, the white boxes with a yellow stripe, the philodendron leaves crawling up the grey window, the red and yellow woven basket holding all of the equations of the world. I wish I was an exponential equation. I wish I was an endless sum. I wish I was a bar graph, but, here, I am a yellow calculator tangled on the wall. Here I am a shopping cart, wheels in the water. Here I am a plastic basket in a see-through pond. Watching, held back by barbed wire and drafted lines, lets me see, eternity, for just an instant, Mr. Harwood burns the field, doubles the book,. Grass fires through the pastures, ballasts the play woods, smokes the clover fields; though it has been raining for days, I invited in the pond, to the kind of rain that sings and glistens down the back of the neck until the dream is water, until even the bicycle wheels are floating in the sky; the kind of rain that makes you think that what is real couldn’t, that what is blue is vermillion, what is cat tail is cipher. The kind of rain that drowses day in a fierce and lonely thirst, later sleep walking around in a doing the dishes sort of zenith. The kind of rain that listens back.

19

Scrutiny I wear white shades, the sort with the red paper roses with glitter center.

The air stirs the red bulletin board as I write on this false computer of the sun, and cite: the moon, the uneasiness, the dizziness, the bathroom stall door.

Here I am the milk in the bowl, the tea in the cup, the pond chef with the rose in the air. The moon is shuttered. When I was five I walked the beehive to knock on the white door of the small rectangular box. What a cube. So many things in my life then were made up of squares. So many things were full of buzzing; things that stung, a sort of calendar imprinting my forehead at the stock pond.

Hera made me clothes—raggedy and ill-fitting socks, clothes that set me into someone else— like wearing a pond around. There was the low hum of dive-bombing insects A light green scummy algae covered the top of my head. Frogs dropped sloppily out of my ears. I smelled like day old lake itch. Logs decomposed behind my eyes.

I was a mess. But my feet kept moving. I made myself trudge over moss, through rye and into the deep clover snow of winter filling up the ditches. I was new, brand new and firmly encased in plastic when I dropped myself off in Utopia. There were no words on me yet. I was unspelled, unvexed, as yet, unspoken. It’s what happens to me when I get dizzy. How I can stay there for hours. I saw I don’t know, but that’s only something that I say, something that is the right thing to say. Of course, I do know. When I was eight I thought the deep end did not end. I was scared of things. I was an open text of Revelation walking around or playing Yahtzee and listening to Billy Graham on an eight track with my knife-making grandfather. The one who thought it was World War I again and again. Paris bombed. The one who showed me how to place a stick crosswise in a wolf ’s mouth so that it could not bite me. The one who made me practice over and over, also added to my overactive, doomsday magnetized imagination. He lived in a different world. I didn’t know. I picked up sticks. I watched for wolves. I knew how to keep their jaws from snapping shut. I don’t know all of it yet, but it was important.

What I was told was going to last never did. What I was told to hold on to, I should have dropped. The lesser mistaken for the major. The undersized the most significant, after all.

20

Perceive On schedule, the healing starts at midnight, chilled, when sound is important, when light erupts within.

Every day, after dusk, after chores, after supper, I travel to the pond. Off calendar, not to fetch wonder, not to bathe, only to gaze, treading kindness, until the water jug of my throat spills over in fullness. Until recognition becomes evaporation.

A scare crow cites the cipher. A gull seethes as it watches.

I build my own, starting with cross of wood, sharpen the spear on the bottom, nudge the rags in the belly, Place the sunglasses on straight. The ritual of constructing the new scarecrow. Torn shirt by frayed once-cuffed pants. The way we hold our hands when we dance under the concrete rafters in the gym, square call by square caller. The day so late now. The pond so hard to find.

The water so deep now. The bottom so hard to ignore. Freyja brings me to where and when I was an audience, asked “What’s the report?”

“There are more crows,” I said, astonished that anything came out of my mouth. Surprised, I had an answer. Dazed, I spoke pond.

Behind me the hammers fixing the barn roof of entanglement, in the heat of enlightenment, in the heat of illusion. A North by Northwest friar, the chaste cauldron, the cracked spigot and me.

21

Buttonhole, Chain, Satin Stitch I The river was the one place the dead didn’t follow her. Almost too narrow to be called river, the Coldwater jagged across the whole reservation and slid down the next county. Every day Argo slipped the slope behind the house to read, the river slugged past. Sometimes the river read her, the water wrapped underneath, lifted, raising the type hiding in her skin to a readable font.

She ran her hand over the side of her leg from thigh to knee— the Braille of herself. Argo smelled of the Coldwater, of the bullheads cleaning the algae off the muddy rocks on the bottom, of the cat tails lining the sides, of the peat bog sloughs feeding the river, of the green gray water that rushed hard only in the middle. River water doused the threads of her canvas shoes, dripped through her clay smeared light blue socks, and ran in the slow as and long os of her speech. Nothing but river: rocks and running water talked to her on the bank. When she returned to the sinking gray shingled two story Argo tried not to breathe too loudly. She clicked the screen door shut, creaked open the white front door, slid inside, tiptoed down to the basement to the cloth folded, stacked, wrapped on bolts— a library of fabric. She picked up two cut pieces of fabric, unpinned the graph paper patterns, sat down in front of the Singer. The power switch cool against her index finger. She sewed the stream of fabric. The silt bled out of her mind.

The river kept her clean, her seams sealed, the dead at bay, and held the day alive in her.

22

Mobile Fringe The circumference of water measured twice, duplicated once, the underside of the eyelids; nothing is more morning than the mist rising on the pond behind the sound of a cowbell with thirty two hooves sinking in mud, eight heads low eye me through the fog as they drink in the purple water of sun up.

The gravel road I stand on is set on water. The still water in the ditch curls around the stick. I hold the hollow stem. The sedge keens in the wind. The sharp claws of the chickadees pock the snow here, there. Such aerodynamics marking until the wind blows the snow off this iced surface behind the maple, the grand light, twittering the weak light of winter. Four o’clock. A dirty glory, a grey rescued from poison in this leaded hotel. A lesson on the road of Mozart, a brave new chandelier, piano chord. Water is ice, links air, creates purple on the tongue. A zoo of emotion.

A tense backward lullaby. The white layered cake of the frosted winter pond.

The pretty explanations of passion, across the field, deep in the pasture.

Across the light-green heart of this blade of grass, frozen at the foot and now exposed by the wind. This simple volcano of the tongue.

This frozen folk tale. This library of water. This climate controlled repository. Here is the world of thin spiders. This woven basket of water.

This place of half in and half out insects. This place set with wings and orbs.

This place fit for hums and chatter of bones. The air blown about this water is different. It is the air of the arrowroot biscuit. The self-satisfied mallard.

The purple goose. Here is where the grass scribes its diary. This is where the near year begins every time the sun climbs up the branches of the pines to stare down into this broken magnifying glass. Off the edge of the field, I am pond.

I am air. I am a trumpet of water. I am the string of the guitar plucked.

Spying on myself in sleep, the world spun backward, I am the wing on fire.

23

Delta Perimeter

The pond asleep. The pond on dream. Reverie, the gravel of the road shard, rock images flash. Pink lingerie stretched tight, floating on the duckweed. The braid. The flash of earring.

The slips meeting mine on the beam of road, the vowels of dream sleep. The stone capped road, grey boulders soft under the feet. Good night. I draw up the top sheet. I pull the covers tight over the pond. I nestle in the duvet, no pillow, but the cat tails pom-pom around me. The pond’s eye closes, my dreams, their roots dangling in the water, surface on the skin of my stomach. My fingers nails in alkali water bring back the sedged bank, the salty soil, the blue velvet box of moss, settling on the unredeemed single wing of a swallow butterfly. This egg, mostly yolk, the white, the sigh; the oak log rotting in the center of it all.

24

The Benchmark of Water

Water sets the time, the lacy roots of the duckweed follow.

The small water snail zigzags. There is no map of this place.

As day falls off, behind my shoulders, light tells.

This is the trick of reality: the knowledge of dusk.

I peel off the edge of the decal with my thumb. I travel everywhere, stopping for all river alders, poplars and milk vetch ponds; reading their red-osier dogwood placards As closely as if they were historic sites.

Walk no farther than the alfalfa field and there they are: they of claw, of thigh, of petrified hemlock.

Here is the sandpiper marking the fossilized snail Here is the snowshoe hare resting on the burst of glacier.

Horn Lark and Vesper Sparrow mirror write in the pond; I am their visitor, back against a poplar, the smooth glide of the skates, submerged.

Water now filling the footsteps. The glass voice.

The smooth touch of a silver faucet, this pond is an ant farm, a tape recorder, a row of wooden seats, a pew of poetry, books, a wet mop, the slide of floor wax, the yellow of the shade pulled down, the unzipped suitcase, the stretch of yarn unraveling the sweater, the vacant carcass of a fire extinguisher, the transformation of attunement and empty.

25

Estate, Unseasoned Flying over, bellies to the wind, the teal head of the leader cocks, loads, and descends.

Parcel, they master position. Chime, they master sound. Set, they master space, time and return.

In their migration, they carry themselves, and all birds, at once, as they traverse the egg of the universe. Why here? Why do they choose this one spot to land? Is it the grass, the sun rays, bent at the edges, that call them back year after year? They steal seasons; they swap seeds. They harness themselves to water lily. Traveling ahead of ice, they visit the marsh. Really, tongue clicks. Round pond. Nice insides. Steep banks. Still water. Scummy, but that’s to be expected.

Turtle glut. Absolutely no Sandhill Cranes, Loons or Trumpeter Swans. Raccoons, Foxes and Star-nosed Moles at capacity. Skunks welcome. Herman’s real estate. Located equidistant between the school of continents and the empress of heaven. Entrance possible when flooded, thawed, or frozen. Water does not leave scars, for now. Shred balance, make haste. Close the seal. Center the contact. Here is the place you have been brought. Here is your landing strip.

Here is your compass, your map, and your meal. Feast on green, as the bright minnows roll deeper, dropping tails and turning right. Make waves in the stillness of the pond. The face in the mirror will answer only once. Let the day set around you. Welcome night with your mouth wide open, your mind summoning all words. Make a crown of thought. Make a bed of falling stars.

Here is where the Northern Lights reverse. Here is where the light falls. Take time, take light and march on, singing. We have miles to go in this pond.

26

Beacon

Scry. The yellow yard light of my neighbor glows like fire trapped in a jar, hidden knowledge a half mile away.

Black mirror. The hum of light so far away I cannot feel the spark. Magic mirror. The pond is where I walk to pick up radio reception. Portal to another. The signal stronger in this lower part of the road than where I stand on someone else’s ancient mountain hands in soap, scrub rag between fingers washing dishes at the silver sink, another plane of existence. This pond is the place I go to get my eyes clean. Every night this pond with its hairy lungwort whispers me a new secret. The secret is hidden of course, like asters. In a small story, in a big poem, root the ancient rites of desire. The pond, hands behind its back, makes me choose right or left and reveals—slowly the nothing in one palm, and the something—a blue stone, a piece of sky, a fallen boat of moss in the other. Oracle, enclosed in a strange perimeter. This pond gives the whole world over, sequined, tissued, cut and shaken.

Somewhere in the bottom of this jack pine pond is my voice, rolling around. Somewhere in the bottom of this pond is my eye, looking up at the sky. Somewhere in the bottom of this pond is the bottom of my foot, sole sliced, pinkie shocked.

I do not see the slow breathing sphagnum moss fish, but I know they are they, under the lid of ice.

The pond keeps my reflection locked in that hat, set in cold fire, my breath etched in air and then domed in ice.

Journey to a distant realm and then some. Gaze.

27

Carriage I. Like lunar rocks, these bulbous balls float, Lolling on the edge of my garden landscape of perspiration, dew and fog. Large fruits—easily hollowed—once plundered, their tale becomes many.

The garden gives story and siege. Scraped off the wall of intense orange, slippery strands woven together, studded teardrops spit out the weaving. Empty, the coach rolls on its side and melts back to earth.

Months went on as I ate a few, kept a few mostly because I wanted the ridged taste of clean dirt, crept into my fairy godmother in Spring, mounded up three-fisted dirt hills.

Composted dreams, the sleeping white orbs embedded in their black mountain, a week, two weeks: green rushed out of the volcano two oval leaves pushed up, breathing black into blue.

Rain soaked through stem, worm-white, silky roots, hairs reaching down, spreading across green umbrella of leaves, settle into the shoulder-like roots.

The leaves with their soft, lush prickles, use their width to take the sun and water.

Reaching vines own the garden plot: beware gophers, moles, vine borers.

Adjoining spiders and ants scale the plants, corkscrew tendrils, rolling up and down springing, curling, winding up and down the burst green and white bud, downy.

Beware beetles, powdery mildew and aphids, silver hairs shining, green prongs protecting them, the male bud rises higher off the narrow, downy stem, the female flower releasing the prongs to show more than what was known.

28

II. Off the tight yellow orb below, showing off the rosebud green plumping luminescent unfurling of the thick hairy flowers; revealing the color of the developing fruit, this vibrant forecast, this foretelling in velvet, this cup of sun smelling slightly of yeast and sweet the guzzling bee, floating on the air, dancing in one flower and then visiting the others. the pollen from the male fruiting the female then the watering, the weeding, the tying up of the vines that climb the fence, the scarred orange, the green and yellow spotting round bursts of orange, mired in brown, the white, the gingered, the flame of red, the stout, stem handles, the gouge of green, the hollowed-out recesses, the stench of pink, rich in pumpkin, rich in pulp, prized by moose, by carvers, by birds the lone pumpkin, forgotten, the sink of the heavy fruit the thud of the tight vinyl veneered exterior collapsing settling, as it liquefies, descends, turns into muck over winter.

Then, the egg yolk coach emerging once again. I meet myself, once over; I tip and thud home. Each inhalation welcoming dirt, chapped hands full of leaves and soil. My dreams sort against skin, settling into earth, slowly becoming garden.

29

Water Mechanics Here I am osprey and eagle.

Here I am ladywalker and pikebug, Here I am amplified, a sound wave touching the far grass.

Water, heal the split in my eye.

Let me be the water away from the steel sink, away from the certain mail box, far from the rows of leeks.

Outlawed from the radish this is the subway stop; this is how I get home where the mica shines.

Through the chalk and the small crushed bones of squirrels and snail shells; this line cuts through the clay.

Leaving the gemmed skulls and the footprints of foxes, left unscarred by the plagues, the famine or the flu. This is the stop that signals my return home; this loop of water, a handgrip that my fingers have, sleeping out the cold, reached for, but never touched.

30

Case of Water

Memory skates below the surface transport here, there, beyond & back. Aquifer.

Years forward. Years spilled. States of matter.

Hint of remembered. Far beyond the Ramblas in Barcelona, she laughs the frontier and I step to the edge of the round smooth pond of her face Her eyes, fish jumping; her mouth the water lily, her nose a minnow hooking round the bend, to look, to see.

Where she smiles, I swim. Adherence, from the bottom of the pond I looked up and saw an upside down cathedral in Madrid. I saw the Alhambra inside out. This fountain was fourteen paintings from the Prado, a light bulb waiting to be screwed in at the 14th step of a stone staircase on 21st Calle.

This pond a faucet in the wall of Barcelona’s Call; periphery drawn by others and ice. The boundary visible only to despair.

This pond glides underneath me everywhere.

Meniscus, this pond calls me home.

31

Book, the Pond -after Maria Sabina Seeking answers, they fled southward. Craving understanding, they looked back, identifying patterns, scouring debris for clues, flocking forward.

Since it had already happened, they threw a stick in, sought to read water.

They tried to buy the book. They endeavored to ask the questions.

Who fired first—goose, pond, culvert, or tree? No matter. Perhaps, blaming the lobbing isn’t what is important here. After that the first volley, the one that broke the surface and began the war, the pond lay flanked, the goose roosted, the tree pined, the future treed. The war of water, the siege, the sedge. Swim, you can’t. The guidebook torn.

Sightseer, she forces a bicycle. Guest, through this pond, wheels become water and fingernail clams. Day-tripper, this caller, she looms 32 feet high. She wields the whirring circles of rain, spheres of tributary.

Traveler, they are inverse mirrors. Lessee, they speak in company.

Poplars, they speak in kind. Tourist, they roar in splintered overlay.

Stranger, I am the cat tail cipher. I am the scatter of gravel on the bank.

Intruder, I am the big rock woman. Visitor, I took left; pines, I took right.

Boarder, I am the constellation seeker. Sleeper, I am the shining star woman. Denizen, I am the water of the pond woman, the knee-deep, algae-rich, still water woman.

Flow, I am the awake woman, resident. Tenant, I am the woman who follows the fence line, who walks the road with my eyes of water, native. Vacationer, I look down with my eyes of earth, I look up, Inhabitant. With the clouds in my teeth, I look east with the back of my eyes. I look North, lodger. The pond looks up as I look down, occupier. Mating or masturbating, our gazes connect and turn water all round, dweller. Book through the pond: torrent, gush, inundation.

Who shot first? Who left last? Who was forced to stay? Me, my friend, always, me.

Lodged in spruce, set in water, nested deep in cattails, flanked by culvert, and clocked in fire.

32

Burdock Shrine This is the way we lurch into Fall and fall bumps gently over that cliff into the endless white they stand with the dark matter streaming from the ends of their fingers attached to the back of their necks. I stood waiting for the book to flip to another page, looking in the index.

Winter was in all the entries.

Slowly, we were all falling into the deep sleep, slipping down the iced walks.

Going glacial, a cave to be kept, rumor preserved before the thaw of my next life.

The morning glory climbs the mailbox, the smell of honeysuckle pierces strawberries. Congregated in the ditch, the goblet of winter closes down on us the slow slide into Spring the heavy dip ice should crash not go out slowly not disappear so incrementally that days after you forget to look suddenly it’s gone and you miss it that slick coating that extra layer between you and pond, the thing that kept you suspended, brought you home.

33

At Table, Blank Wedding The serving set for seven, minus butter knife and salt cellar. This is the tile I burned. This the plate I ran red ochre and yellow paste across, over and over, in time for dinner.

The tablet set. The supper on.

The purple skins of the egg plant charring the borage; a vinaigrette of fugue and tears.

The phone at my ear, the voice a lie in my blood stream, but our hearts pump together in stillness. Unannounced, The thief, the calculator and the Roman steps. Untracked, the train late. The baggage checked.

The dĂŠjĂ vu ticket stamped. Ignoring other elements, I eat pond. I travel through.

We board, over and over, overboard and under the dock, under board, and overturned.

The ceremony set for eleven; the wedding conducted in darkness: night the consecrator, night the witness, night the feasting, night the guest, night unsettling, night the ring.

34

Mother of the Pond Water is compatible with ice. The body of winter with her ground swelling wars so well; as this ridge falls on the grain line. Seams pressed open, tension fine, the stitching of the Winter Ball into full ritual vow closure echoes. The pearlescence of my mother’s wedding dress stepped on by wind thrush. The shantung pulled tight between spruce, the opaline cording on the straight pine fence posts, the fine tension of the barbed wire, consistent down the road. The princess seams cruise the pond, the iridescent bead work, the war sway of organza around the maples, the georgette center of the pond, the peax de souie overlay; the lace of snow rolled veil lapping the culvert. I hold my breath. I walk through my mother’s wedding, her train breaking with each boot print, my face falling, melting softness, the lowering sun turning and crusting the entire deep rose road. My uncle filets her silver fish, descales it. No one else in the family can, though he pretends to teach all, while showing none. The actuality of fish scaling shows in the belly loping on the sheer fabric of my mother’s veil. The grain reveals the wrist motion, the knife blade, the next angle, the underside, the undone.

How can he gut and yet not gore? The knife inhales. How can he disappear the technique there, in front of my breathing eyes? The stomach spills out across the cornet and water washes the blood into a thin line of white.

35

Induce

I sell Velcro by the inch. The back, the sides, the length of the jacket and the pants are equally as important as the front view. I suggest darts.

Our bodies are not flat (as most patterns suggest.) Impulse: elongate time.

Ignore the impulse. We will sew the entire pond in ceremony for you.

Yes, I know, certain things are repeated: time, birth, pockets, side seams, pleats, set-in sleeves. The ritual stitching begins. Look away, pretend you are not here.

Encased in tulle, you are invincible. The trick of the invisible: the strongest seam is concealed; the best stitch anchors unnoticed; the finest sewing is the unseen.

36

Glisten, Glimmer, Gleam Pickling it in amber, pricking it with blood, I preserved the pond. Setting the surface with lichen, rubbing silt across the seal, high table, low tide, I hold the feast crepuscular.

No, no one asked me. True, I have done stranger things in my quest after being halved at the origin, quartered by the kin.

Tongue jarred. Stamped and dated, I dress in pond silk; the hem holds water, and the shattered spouse.

In fear, guts, and glory, I stitched the cat tails; I wove Winter in the water lilies around me.

If I were someone else, I’d have left long ago. But I sit here, unknowable. I set the music stand. Longitude ran deep within.

This is my practice: to walk and look at this pond each day. If it exists, I still exist too. Seeing it is the way I know that I have not gone away. This poem marks me as I eye it. All day I’ve been boiling on the stove: pots of green beans, brine for pickles. I’ve been setting my shouts and glares into the jars while packing cucumbers in treetops of dill. I bring my lake a can of preserved peaches; and take back the reply of the pond in a jar, the water's answer encapsulated in foam.

Here swim too many minnows. There is the spackle-boned turtle. There is the lily splash of frog. There is my morning, and my mud tongue. Here I dress in algae; here, I speak in snail.

37

Dart They slipped into the sonnet of the pond, never dumped, this palace of snow, this piùata of a purse, this iced hall--call it the throne room—this picturesque, this patterned pond.

This bowl once held her, seated on the diagonal diadem, feet in the swamp, hand on the orb, flooded spiral staircase of water. Rush of Snow. Queen and Ruler of the Universe.

A bent brook., this whole valley, my last life, there are things to see: the dark brown belly of the trout, the flash of white in the sky. The flare of black underneath. Here to see what has changed. Here to see. Here to see that I have changed. Here to sting and die smart.

A contented kink, this is my final destination. Maybe means I am traveling to this pond from somewhere further than the basement this sugar tongue, this pond, Aife’s pool somewhere distinguished, some place pick pockets converge, the target of professional beggars and the intention of travel writers some where they skip lunch and travel 847 miles to photograph and buy souvenirs, torn grass and algae residue, the calls of the sparrows, the crackling of the insects, this is the place that can be an alternate source of income. This is the place that can be grated, swept, and kept in a frame, a personal waterway, a transportable tributary, a captured canal, a caged watercourse, an individual stream, a turned loop, a wringed weave, a zig zag, a twist and turn, a slipped slide, a corked screw, a wound up coil, my own spiral variation.

38

Spill: Reverse Here memory is frozen. This is the pond where she drowned, red-eyed vireo, the plastic wrapped girl with the orange head scarf. The one whose eyes leaked, American goldfinch.

The one whose meter ran like a taxi suspended.

Mascara marked her face like graffiti on a headstone, gore beetle. The one who added her name too late to the green wall. In the fourth.

The duck treading water, caddis fly, The flood light of pond rushes through her bull rush perching, braiding cat tails in her veins, least flycatcher. I watched the cleft in the lily pads through the lattice of sweet grass, the duckweed undone by rain, black-capped chickadee.

In the fourth month of pond, forest tent caterpillar; I stood next to myself, ruffed grouse.

A gauze of grape hyacinth, an orange velvet tulip, hairy woodpecker she walked on the rivulet, the hallway of water opened. She awoke on the bottom of the tributary.

Speak to me in bird. Speak to me in pond. Speak to me in water. Speak.

39

Fractured Muse

My bonfire life submersible, my whole life frozen, gender a speedometer from zero to one thousand. Noose, I walk on cracked ice, explosions through winter. My whole life immersed. My sky, twelve inches of frozen water. The water my memory. The water recalled upward from this pond.

Somewhere, in here is the truth, combustible in water. Instead of male, imagine transmission. The ice wobbles on the water. Pawn, fire on the snow.

Rook, flames in the air. Ruse, I return home. I switch states. Instead of female, think fluid. Honey bee, Thieves’ Thistle and Oak Beam, She turns over the green leaf of wild rhubarb, the shy mushroom. The water witch seeing molasses in White Ladies’ Hands, thumbs the medicine in the poison.

If water had a gender, it would be love. My curing happens at night bedded with bird chili, ash and salt. The curing completes in the witching of water, in the washing of blood.

I skitter over veins of rime; I sink in hoarfrost. Frozen in place, I sing ice.

40

Arsenic Fountain Smaller than a conch, feet sunk in esker, the serpentine ridge winding through, past torn roots, the sweep of the os, eyes dry behind the sluice, this sink waits.

Deep in the trough of the ditch, dirt ridged hands, numb from walking behind the tractor all day long, teeth muddied, fingers cold from picking potatoes, I seek the water nest; the water net, test tube throat, recipe of water, segment of glacier residue edged green. There are shipwrecks in this pond. It would not be lying if I said the devil sponsors a whirlpool here. Death in a blue recycled glass. The same story ending the same way, a flash of red light, and the storm deep within the surface, everything points to blue jays. This is the closest one can get to the abyss while living to spell the song, in the mindless liquefaction of cold and morning this mist like the whisper between lovers, the space between the act and the discovery of the betrayal, the blindness that comes before the hurt, peace lurks, I follow the invisible bank. You see the place where the water meets pasture, where wet meets even wetter. This is church, the place where she can see each raindrop and the stingy heart of the rain. This is a side of the hedge, fairy tale sink.

The fern foams. She sets the slope. She follows the orange cat, thinking: ginger. Him: paws sinking in soil. Her: knees knocking in green waders. They: a bucket of oats, the sun turning the pond into marbled glass. The broken nautilus full of borrowed water, the ripped bridle, the frilled scrap of saddle blanket, the deep pit of skeleton, the bitten cupola, the pond a broken dryer, a worm of lightening, the fern folding, creating a sphere of light in the bowl, enlarging the breath, securing the grounding, changing moment into water, opening to the brilliant plummet of the foundation.

41

Pleasure Garden, Body Craft The circlet bird frozen in flight. The pond solid. The ground petrified.

And on it all the delights of ice await. The pond sweet. The blades cut diamonds of the invisible. The pond decorated. This is my frozen Thames. Me in the inverse.

Me looking up from the other side of the mirror. My chance to be both Elizabeth and onlooker, separated only by a single strand of rope, imaginary border, cold coronet in the carnival of frost, all at my command. Iced, the body can swap.

There are no guarantees; still, I attended five of the four classes designed to help me stay in my body, to remain present. You see, I’d been stopping in, only once or twice every day or so to check on my heart, to brush these mossy teeth.

Mostly I was living in my other body, the one in Lyre, South Africa, that body was having a lot of problems. Couldn’t keep off the damn linoleum floor. Major things.

I had to stay with her September, October, and November, before she’d stop shaking.

I built these tongues, hearts, mother-in-laws, these immune systems, to run on their own but that’s not the way it always turns inside out. Above Mud Eye pond in a rush of glory mat, in a flurry of sedge nettle, pushing through the rocky slope ignoring the dainty curling tendrils of the common vetch she stood, belly arcing with child and flew through. It was my mother falling through water, back into me. Our spines passed, then were parallel once more Two ammonites, settling into air, then sand. All amniotic fluid bled Curves matched. Only the katydids heard, turning their slender necks before continuing on to granite, before twisting their ankles on rice, before freezing over.

42

Talking in Snow: A Short History of Sound Suspended, it’s all so much better here: the mouse tracks, matchsticks dragged under the wonder of meeting the flurries of others, sieving the traces of blizzard and snow burst; this frozen encounter has melted me. Altered: a stationary camera, an entangled tripod, the way I erode at the edges, the way my voice slips in and out of the frozen levels of float, through the thoroughly submerged layers of language.

Here is where I try to swim. Here is where I drown. Inked in ice, the hieroglyphics of water in frostbitten orbit tell it all, but only once. Traced. You come back stained, wild strawberry-styled bangs. You come back thirsty, greened by tall grasses. Spotted red, you come back scratched in two, your eyes closing against sun, your eyes smelling of fear from the ambled approach of bear and cub, unannounced and all too close—their breath imprinted on your spine. You come back to the trunk of water.

You come back to case. Here is the word written on the water.

Here is the water written on the word.

Here is the papered wasp of the nest unfolding.

Dissolving in this place that is not ocean, not sea bank, just pond-- sans salt, sans vista, sans eased floatation--no promise of more.

I hand myself the thin mirror of water.

I hand myself the layer of sky reflected back.

I hand myself the moment of mallard floating over minnow, of blue heron stepping on fingernail clam.

I hand myself to myself. We hold hands.

We breathe backwards. We fall together, earth and sky; the all that is, more than enough.

43

Rime The iced-in water weed producing oxygen, delusional in February, the bread that gives the villain power, listening in the pond an iced blue-green skillet hardened by damp soil, the trance of water, this is the place that swallowed the stars last night, the place that seizes tomorrow’s bursts and holds them in reserve the place where today is detained, like a pause between notes, the eaves of the pond shake, the roof cracks. He is standing between the branches of the dream, snow falls from his fingers in a baffle of dendrites of branching instability. His forehead cracks with thunder; this gilded water is where leaves are made.

Deep in the ice lock she walks away from the matted walls, slipping her foot against the globe, bending the shadow of ice near the rattled reeds, tattered by frost, twigs bare, the alder cones clatter, the catkin leaks against her diamond forehead with the soft telekinesis of water. The flat worm, the larvae, the pond snail entrenched in the deepest part draws her into this state of self-hypnosis, the clairaudience of water, the psychometry of the situation, the jangle of shaft, the water knitting, the sun cracking the surface of thought, the twigs tapping at the wind, this the year we submerge, the time we do the Atlantis. Rushes shed snow and in mythic shift, I want to go with the pond. I’m better in water, albeit thick mirror distorted in ice, even with the leaves of the yellow flag iris, even with only leaves and everything brown and tattered, even only with remnant. I’m clearer when iced, when I do the Atlantis, when I am larvae-fed. The green and yellow flame browned, I hurt no one in water.

44

Broken Equation Outside the mathematics of water, the small thumb on the forward, the slow projection, the dawdling month. Chasing the dappled mare, the paddock broken. Through brackenfern and mugwort, she’s running again.

Thistle matted coat. Nose alert with frost. She heaves. I chase. Spotting her shadow before her flank. The algebra of art. The numerics of air in ice.

The physics of water. Boots after hooves. Falling through the snow.

How I gave over to the waltz. Why I want to be a dancer is that moving, like winter, makes things clearer.

The swathe of cold over dropped leaves, there is no need to speak on the sea of pine needles.

Winter sets the stage. The pond frozen over in September 1100.

It is the year of the snake. The Sioux have not left yet.

The pond is open until December of this strange year. Here an Anishinabe woman sits alone. She has told the story that should not be told during winter And she will, freeze over with the pond. December 1700 is not acting in character, though. Everything is thaw. The leaves are gone, but the land has not locked into crystal yet. She waits to solidify.

It is a long wait. December 2700, the air is warm. The sky pink at noon. The orbit of the pond is now smaller. There are only four ducks where there were fifteen. The wood duck, mallard, the teal winged jay, the ghost of the gray wolf The pond is a tarred crown, a thatched roof, wrong side up or upside down when we have not hung the new pictures on the walls when we had not yet put up the muslin curtains I am Pytheas claiming Thule in her cool way. I walk upward to the pond Attic. I stand at the drowned clock when the place when day gives way to night.

After opening the door of the pond, I do not leave. I reside only in water. I house in the liquid here, in the drenched now, in the dampened present, a tributary future.

45

Tengo Sueño Speed kept, roar undone, the pressure of the kiss parked on ice; the snow screech of tires skidding sideways across crystallized landscapes. The pond supports the wheels; metal and steel weights the iced orb.

The pond sings frozen; an enamel stalk of corn, serving as pedestal for this enactment of love.

The pond slips, the car remains, lips tipped, gas sloshing in the tank. Particles of hay.

Firework sprayed leaves, steeped and settled in ice.

This chickadee sweep, this objectivity, this word stew of hands holds my feet in their boots to the ground though my wooden room calls me to heat and dark brewed tea. Wind thrashes the smoky sides of poplars. This pond frozen is milk in a bowl. A silver slit, a polyhedronic keeping, the grey sheen of larch, with its mask of tragedy, comedy settles over my forehead swirling the barn scent off me.

I crave only red blue separation of finch and other anything but the white, grey beige, brown of winter on the back of night on rural water. This is the winter lot.

The pond is a weep catcher, a weed slow, a root mansion, a wood bank. My water moccasin garden, drenched in red.

The place where the mirror fell through, the place the echo emulates only itself. The radiant parallel center. The undulating nerve of seconds.

The shield once set, now broken. The marvel of movement caught in the surface, turned to stone. The wheels revolving in broken water, on molecules of splendor.

Here, the future is spurned. Here, speed reverses time. Here, the axle chains past into future.

*Title from Louise Bogan’s “Last Hill in a Vista”: “Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches/How we are poor, who once had riches” 46

Ice Gait: Pond at Rites Winter settles everything in frost, in roar, catches it in time. Winter segments waiting.

This pond my heated crypt, my humid prayer, my unused tongue, my staircase out, this pond handed me a mermaid charm, a fresh water siren, and a talking stick.

This water prayed over me, slipped under, ending all suspension.

Unlike Summer, melting incident into event. Water prayed into me.

The wet eye. No rotting water lilies. My very own cauldron, melted earth, not iron. Kept in, leaked out, the slow banks, the torn ragweed, the entity of water, as Lao-Tzu said the True Way cannot be defined. Winter waits. No stink of peat. No void of smudged fire. This hollow defines the states of water, my pond.

The woodpecker drumming on the palm. Born in birch, this pond holds me fast, stays the dark energy gripping the galaxy. Safe by design, by accident, by error.

The pond encryption, the transmission of my address past the evil eye nation.

Winter slices occurrence. This pond is my heated heart, my unchained prayer, my idle lexis, my ladder up; this pond handed me a diviner’s charm, a seer’s eye.

This pond threw up books. This pond caught my questions. Through the blue drought, through the reverse tornado, through the lace of birch, this pond whispered why. Everywhere I walk is cracked. Ice explosions in winter.

My gait in winter is slip, is slide. My gait in winter is flaked crystal. My whole life submersible, as the ice wobbles on sphere. The ice chipped in the eye forces sight. My cumulative life frozen; the summation of all life under twelve inches of frozen water, the water my memory, the memory water sojourns in this globe. Winter breaks experience, sections dreams. Somewhere in the middle of this root darkened orb is the truth. Hex appeal, dire on the water. Pawn, black fire in the ice. Rook, mirror flames in the air. Queen and King, asleep in crystals of snow.

47

Crossing The big freeze runs through the veins of road and elbow. This is how winter outlines everything: death, despair, birth, jealousy.

The bad heart, defining tongue from throat, heart from hand, lays down the birch bark.

I make a rubbing of the snow.

What does my soul seem like flake by flake? Poetry in pieces on her brain. She was looking for death with its white breath and its odd, wide, icicle pattern of walking.

Freezing in its own tracks, before the next step, winter shows the shape of trees.

So, why not my soul, half in-half out, of this body?

If I turn quickly enough, I will catch myself standing there. One breath, one half step behind me, glinting, having been present always.

Ice tells. Its density will give me the weight I’ve craved, the sweet knowledge of the self, the strong self having been holding out its damp hand, the embroidered edge of the pillow, the sodden waiting all this time, when all that was really needed was snow.

Robbed of leaves, rich in icing, winter spills what summer steals.

48

Winter, December #73

Always here by four, in time for the deep shape shifting of the dark coming down and the day light rushing up and over and out to gift some other place— Tibet or Helsinki—with the warmth to breathe interim, pause, shattered window: the warmth to think in the frozen stillness, across from Westphal’s field, next to Herman’s woods this pond sits off the ditch of the Johnson road.

Here on this cracked ice sits this crooked heart.

The left ventricle sets up shop. The broken twig whispers, betrayed by hoarfrost, set against honeyed snow.

This pond ice stoppered: magic potion in a corked, smoked bottle. eye to eye with the Artic loon. Today is all sleek rock, entirely freezing rain.

The chill anesthetizes my throat.

My eyes brewed the red moon. I walk to the broad curl of ammonite and look in. The snow shapers are out in whisper thought form sipping jeweled tea. The avalanche in my brain makes me look for the immersed Lady of Shallot, drowned Greensleeves, Ophelia upside down; Joseph likes to look at women underwater.

Is this how he sees himself ? This is not someone else’s grail; this is my own mead cup. A dance of rocks solidifies space and time, iced out.

My throat slips as my breath is revealed here on this cracked ice. My hand races past my nostrils, past sight, blinding me. This pond the fourth angel, the one who carries the trumpet. I wait at the junket water’s edge to see the beginning.

Every rock tells the story of the start. When I look at the pond I stare in the molten center of myself: the moving, unformed, steaming bit.

Slightly frosty now, frozen over, spiking the air within— the beat suspended, the ice cracked in the slit of the breach.

49

Mallowed Axis

I bear no vengeance toward water. This February the pond went to Lima; made the pilgrimage to Malpuc on its algaeic knees and returned yesterday.

The retrofitted tickets re-conditioned molecularly, reconfigured, having touched the hemmed tongue of the Virgen Mary, having tasted God. So, yes, I owe the pond at least one letter mailed from a foreign clime --the postmark hollow, the stamp golden, the back of the envelope sealed with an obsidian thumb of wax, a luxuriously inked cancellation, the misdial of common figwort and wild rice. On the cracked map, this pond is the place. The red arrow, set safely in space, at the “You are here� in bold in the center of the map: It is the sextant. This pond is the eye of my universe, the spot from which all centrifuge takes place. This water is my magnet, and my past, the famous underwater library that burned yesterday, through my brain, the iron window from which the braced steel snow globe in the white floor mall rounds, the spliced marrow department of mistaken shoes and pulsed pots. This pond is the busted arrow.

This pond is the skinny dip. This pond is the burst balloon. This pond is the drawn drum. This pond is the burst dam. This pond is the receipt. This pond is dirty snow, a record, a hallelujah. This pond marked where I existed; this pond the proof I held out.

50

Visitation Pyre

No need to bore a hole, set up a candle and peer through Only minnows— No need to dig in snow banks for words, for worms.

Somewhere else this pond would be ocean and I would be cloud The ice is that way, a shard pushed into my center dark pond and I, this far inland, have only ourselves, each the other, to remind ourselves where we are in there, other than here. this pond, frozen, has me, while I have chosen it, for my lover, for my necklace, for my hand; dream the clamped podium.

Tear the collage of victims.

This pond my tarot card, my altar, my ammunition. This pond my singing bowl, sequestered from me, cornered by triple rows of barbed wire, triple lines of corn, the intestines of a silent fight looped around the post. This pond across the property line, a reverie, in a double time of rage.

The one who taught me that war is a strange sort of advance, that war, or its shadow, can come at you years later in a corn crib, who taught me how to place the stick perpendicular to stop the wolf jaw from snapping down; who taught me to cut boughs 51

on place them on my back, to circle the pond, not walk straight across the ice to prevent the wolves from attacking from behind at night, for the first time his white china cup is cold. He’s not slapping black flies, or whittling at the long dining table. My limburger eating, gray wolf quick grandfather lies supine as if floating. Is it him? I’ve only seen him in motion, watching orioles and song sparrows, sugar cube between his teeth, sucking coffee, full of bracted honeysuckle and yarrow. Now, on the stretched water surface of the pond, the blurred weave of the wool shirt the polished sarsaparilla skin pulled tight over cheek bones away from lips, his whole body larger in death, than life. The water buoying up the brown shoulders, the leanness of his size. Reaching out to touch him, I smile as his last words enter my palm. He sheds his skin, his scratchy shirt.

He rises, mist moving off the pond, a dragonfly splitting its carcass. He rises where I can watch him. Eye on wing, rough humming in the ear, the constant smooth, smooth, smoothing of his palms available to me now. Here in the water is the chair where he sat.

Now only smooth wood. Is that you? Wearing your wool scratchy long johns?

Where are your rag weed pulling hands, your quack grass pulling thumbs?

Where are your straight lines of two-speared corn? Your high climbing pole beans?

52

Ice Museum Anointed There is no chance of flooding in winter, so an ice-kissed Templar floats under the surface of the ice—lost one, forgotten Carpathian--this pond’s daughter, girl in the glass vest, jewel-cut from night and salt. The Ice History Museum etched for an instant in molten glass. The Kabbalah melt.

The Mandala shimmer. The last red leaf of the banyan.

The rim. The pond an empty basket woven with reeds. Here, in winter, with each puffed breast. The numbers connecting the words. The numbers that are words clatter down. The pond bottom and I, both in dark murk—a barely breathable warm— covered with so much light—the moon retracting the snow cover. This poem is a test rattled with wrong answers.

I come here to surprise myself. There is always something new here. The way the snow folds, the charge of wind. This poem a frostbitten limb of myself; a known and an unknown. The snow knit loosely over the gravel like thin lace. The pond is a body, like my own, a body of water, of dread, of renewal. When I leave to go back home, it is a rough crossing—past the mail box, down the curve, tires skidding down the rocked road. Lost two. Me, designed to leave a bit of the pond with me—though splattered; travel off gravel and into light.

53

How To Melt Go to deep water. It’s that sort of encyclopedia--this pond, winter grey and white, with out of date notes on the spine, pages set backward, bought on installment, set payments for years--sort of book club rendition.

All of the knowledge of the western world set in a dirty bowl, swirling, without a drain.

The papier-mache method of layering, the cortex deepened with knowledge.

Pond fabled. Fen driven. Bought on purpose. Sold on time. Certain of the blue legends are true.

Roughly one in forty attributes can be recognized. Rhodopis, after the rent, retired here with an artichoke.

Aschenputtel, her days spent throwing geraniums, at ghosts, scenting the water with that white armed, slashed blue gown sometimes nibbles at mushrooms and pushes the sides of Guernsies gently, bowing to them, in play.

Rinse, melting does not require previous knowledge. Walk to the pond at noon; eat a cheddar cheese sandwich. Repeat.

Watch the pond. Measure the snow cover by eyelid.

There are days and days of this ice sharding.

There are days and days of grass poking through the snow.

There are months of absolutely no movement.

Apply scrutiny. Apply rage. Apply prayer. Repeat. Walk into the pond at midnight. Stand at the edge. Watch the ice crack. Fall in. Launch out. Dive deep, sequestered until Tuesday.

54

Chassis Even so, beyond the pond in the tamarack ring, the tour begins; they say the world awaits; {but this, this is my pantry}, this is my Mason jar.

This, through the wide angle of a soda bottle is my world. Alien though I am: having no bark, bearing no class etching the endocrine system of the pond. I’m here for the ring of willow.

The source of blue, I summon the portal.

How long have I been standing here, waiting, snow wetting my eyelashes?

My cheeks numb now—my tongue slows and meets ice.

So much silence frozen in the air in this negotiation.

The air is lighter. The night heavier, as I pull, never turning my back, since I sent my question into the ice.

A leaf impaled on the barbed wire fence scratches at me.

I look at the ring of pines to the left of the cleavage, of sand and rock. The pond is silent and longing to rush the snow. To get off the road walk through the deep crust snow, join the circle of pines to become one with the world of sap and spiders. The wax for today is yellow, the snow will lock. Consequently, I secured the torrent with a dead bolt and a hectagon worth of combination.

55

Scheduled Charm

The fishing bat keens. The wall of trout doesn’t enter here.

Spying the pond; she entered the water with her eyes circumscribing water. How does she get from herself to the pond? How does she get from the small cow pond full of the muddy water to bigger water?

Water from which she could drink?

She tried echolocation until the smallest reverberation passed her by, the clarity of water on the eyes, the sound of water the denotation of liquid, the rush of water against the tongue, this pond is a medallion given to her by a tattered owl, left in the hoof of a deer this pond is a Kurdish rug she travels to visit a Mayan huipile hanging by the corn cob walls of a house. The bees landing here are not like other bees. These bees feed on holy water, sipping the instant deep in the spell, sipping the moment of sleep into dream.

56

Moon Minnow: Exodus, Amend Spring was here, then plunged: 1.

2.

I know this road by heart even on a night broken brighter than day due to moon

3.

4.

Minnows my foot on iced gravel

5.

6.

sound ricocheting across the crystal folds of fields.

I came to listen to the water—foam

7.

8.

the wind the rain came in on the wind on the frozen drum of the pond

9.

10.

The form of the pond changes. Not in my mind

11.

12.

But in front of my eyes My ice and slush expand

13.

14.

to include arrival of bird, To the awakening of the fish

15.

16.

To the invoice of cat tails.

My mind holds all the cards

17.

18.

My pictures of January holding the pond in white from the fierce

19.

20.

sleep of February to the yawns of March. April’s shredding, the

21.

22.

surface of the pond is unraveling It is cracking into a puzzle. Bordered

23.

24.

by mud. The howl of the center, framed by dead grass

57

The Timing of Mud

It may already be too late, as time passes, then blocks her.

The byway waits, so she slips on the heel of patent leather pumps to walk the bottom of the pond, back and forth. The pond dragged by sedge The gods are in balance; the goddesses sleep.

Time resumes. Now the surface gives two skies The constellations repeat. The orbits lengthen.

They relay themselves back and forth.

She has mapped this pond, its depth, its width.

Each layer recorded on the back of her hand The whole pond fills her palm. Pond—an ever tightening trap of fish hooks and line.

Face like a snow queen. The abrupt bump of suffering tells no tale. The fringed jacket, the cursed. Pop-up brown bear, the staccato of the milk frother, the endurance of horses, the hoses of the milking machine, the hiss of the cappuccino maker, the end analysis, the final calculation, the overarching equation of the pond, the algorithmic thaw all ask, what is the shape of the pond?

Day, she checks in with the golden eagle sitting by the deer kill on the side of the road. Until there are new arrivals, the Sandhill crane flings his chest, his neck moving in the S shape.

Another one walks in, they holler and dance, hit each other in the chest red and brown, looking like the fence posts, beaks stabbing at the grain of each other. They eat worms in the furrows of the field plowed in fall, soil frozen in their waves in winter, now spreading water in Spring.

58

Teach March {after Jane Miller’s “Marin Headlands”} Be prepared for the worst; I was taught to be primed for the inevitable.

I taught myself to wait for the unexpected, to pass with my breath reaching out to here.

Equipped for hatred, all set for ignorance, organized for destruction, arranged for slaughter.

Some children’s Aprils come that way: serene, rested and content. My April shoved in, prone to fighting, driving off the road, fits, frustration, and generally propulsed malcontent.

Here in my head the dark violet sunset of winter lingers, orange and blue anger settled everywhere. I wish I could teach March to stay, to lodge deep; I wish I could teach myself to keep March in.

59

Ice Out

There would be shards if this were a ledge; however, this is only a granite bowl.

Ice knives the shore.

In the middle, a plate of ice bobs, smaller and smaller. The clouds and I place bets on when the first water plant will dislodge from its shoot; on when the egg carton of my life will break, the way the yarn unwinds and the threads splay the way the wild rose petals fall, the way the morning opens like a crushed cardboard box backwards on a train to Grovesnor; I would take him to a flower. I would let the edging of the shirt fall.

The lilacs are bowing their heads, the sheen of their glossy green leaves singing the broken trill of the yellow scissors flower. This pond a yellow handle, this pond a woven wire, this pond a palm full of embroidery thread, this pond a lost red bead from yesterday’s necklace, this pond the golden bracelet, the mountain crumbled, the volcano blown and come back.

60

Watershed

Before I was a raindrop, I was a snowflake, melting.

I was a rock pocked bowl of a puddle, deep and muddy, holder of red maple leaves and earthworms, an urn for sparrows and crows, reflecting the power line, barbed wire and angled mailbox.

First I was a puddle and then I became a pond.

The stretch was painful—but worth it.

My growth increased. I could hold more algae. Tadpoles congregated.

All this was before the drought.

First I was a puddle, and then I dried up. But not before I held the sky.

Not before I provided splash, not before fish arced high from my belly into the blue. These are the spaces of life: pond: bank, center, a worm locked in ice. In winter you see where the pond comes from the surface.

Not underground streams, not caved caverns of water, in winter, deep in the banana fish glut, I resist calling the Persephone-self back from Hell.

Instead, I fall. I wait. There is no need for rescue for their will be a solid moment. After the freeze, it is easy to build ice steps and walk out, whistling.

61

Unknown Things About Rain Fresh from the gravel parking lot ritual in town, I brought death to the pond.

Slowly, holding the funereal cake. I left the white dissolving on the bank.

There is a window in my pond, the right pane shattered, the glass shot through my de-iced voice, my knees mud-high in chore boots.

The cows come slowly forward, lowering their heads to draw snow slush, nudging the cake to get to the water streaming up their broad nostrils.

These walking mud puddles, sides matted with spring, the groaning of the lilac crocus emerging, heads up through the snow—much too early and then turning translucent in the freeze. With their broad noses they nudge in Spring. With their wide hooves, they skirmish through pasture.

Leaving a path wide enough for me to follow, winging oats, rolling ragweed, spreading rye for bedding. Feeding the grey squirrels, lowering the light layering the darkness, adding to the roundness of the land. Death, now crumbs, scattering in the wind. Death laying itself to rest, to revolve, to rescind.

62

Helix

My hands stained with blood roots, deep in April. The red coat moss calling to the lungs of the downed maple. Asking the question starting with what I hope to be a controlled burn, risking only the smallest answer in the mystery of bronze, in the bitter taste of copper. Somewhere deep down here rest bones. Before the glaciers, were the dinosaurs.

Single celled coil organisms began the long march of replication. This is time called back: site white out.

This is the place for the slimed eggs of frogs in Spring.

Winter has rewritten everything deep white now.

Roots are inaccessible, trapped in frozen earth. Spring is accessible only by memory and so often I forget the bite of green. The midmorning thaw. The coming of the blackbirds.

The weight of the bobolink’s claws clenched on the sideways rope of the long grass. The wind waiting on the tongue: a crimp, a murmur, a ruse.

63

Mud Story

Witch water: telling time. The pond a shadow clock. Cat tails at 10 and at 2.

This pond a diffused roulette wheel, I turn from afar, my remote luck mute, the grass striped a buttered green, with the withered brown of an apple, a touch of the beige of dried pumpkin seeds, the cream of a caved in tunnel.

If I could sleep in the middle of this water, I would duck down deep.

I would slip my shrouded heart in and slug it out on the washboard.

I stand here in the creamy mud looking into the deeper silt of the pond and feel like a story, a little, veiled story with no sentences, shy, pale verbs, a soft song with too many nouns, and not enough tune left to tell.

It’s not an ashen crossroad, just a dip in the straight gravel line, the blurred line that underlines ditches, puts cowslips and lady slipper moccasins, and salamanders and newts running in bold. The pond inserted itself into the conversation with myself under the cover of the morning fog. Here is where I come to see my circles. I look back at the edge of me at the white crane etching itself on one foot.

I look back to see who bites around the ends of me. I look backward and catch myself rippling; sometimes, I switch myself front to back to see what was behind me for all this time 64

I catch past, like silver minnows between my hands. I watch the wan, painted fish watch me.

I set the scenes of my life as if they were made of felt.

Along the glitter twigged bank, I float a feather and a number cut out of foam to circle back to me. The pond is a mask.

I put on the front of my face, my eyes see sideways, golden since no one sees in. My nose breathes through it.

This pond a respiratory system, this pond the sort of thing that dries out if you forget it, like clay against the bottom claw of the table. A thing sent to myself in a milky lily long ago and it ended up here, in my palm today, the rusted handle of the scissors, the knotted thread, the crushed paper bag, the bay of fish the forest green chenille stick, solvent the color of a used watercolor reservoir, there brown and orange, here green and blue becoming black, the liminality, the sum: 4,000 pounds of water, 18 types of waterborne plants two trumpeter swans, four eggs, one baby.

My body knew how to be with water.

When she is twelve I will tell her that my walk to the pond, written off as a walk to the mailbox, passed off as a chore in which I took a quick turn to the left and left the perimeters to which I was prescribed was a quick walk that, in retrospect, saved my life.

74 steps down gravel to the pond saved me.

At first it was the woods, when I was conscribed, which saved me. The trees looking back at me, their bark meeting my palm and then, a bit older, it was the thick sap of ink in pen, the long blade of graphite down the center of the pencil 65

which rescued me. Then it was the edge of my belly meeting the air of the pond which gave me a dictionary of the self, something with which to get through the years.

A something I didn’t know had saved me, until I was looking back, thousands of miles later and remembered the roundness of it the sheer smell of water standing day after day, the way the air charged around the pond the way I became clear, the way I folded into myself, when looking into the mirror water, rattle folk.

The birds and I. The weeds and I. The deep. Time: a shadow clock in which I swim.

I will tell her: find a pond.

I will tell her: send a flower forward It will save a life you didn’t even know you had. I will tell.

66

Deck

the light on the brown-stained, ivory rondula calls me in closer. All the symbols swim at the bottom, there the hanged man, here the four of swords. Caught in ice, the ice scorpion dreams.

The hierophant ring sa back flip, a triple somersault.The empress does the side stroke in this tarot of pond. Slow to emerge, written on the water only, like the burp of a fish, or the tail flick of a dragonfly nymph. The back of my neck told me even before I found the hollow, berries grew there, raspberries and one bear, stepping in my tracks, my Sorrels fit right in the three star minuet. My paws curl over my eyes, settling into snow, fur, between crystals and veins.

My nose checks out the cold, the polynomials of it all.vIn this pond, I am the red fox that visits. The bone trapped in ice, resting in a temporary amber crystal.

The only one allowed emotions in the once seven was Algernon. The one who could teach everything and nothing.

The one who whispered water; not swimming, not the quadratic rhythm.

He passed on the howling of pain.

A tree raised me up through Winter. Now, Spring is here, too soon for sun and all things soft.

Too soon for the mud to sing me up, yet in time for the inventory of the lapped heart.

67

Dirge Dream Hiatus

April sets the harbor Egyptian style. The tattoo of rain water. This streaming. The harsh mud symmetry of April. The algebra of buds to blooming.

If this is April there should be a pond here.

But today is cold, and all is cracked frozen.

The water caught shards. The ground under my feet Returned to ice. The water in front of me is flat.

All is solid once more. My breath a vapor in the air, I yearn to melt. April is a two-sided coin, a teeter totter of weather: now thaw, now frozen. The poplar trees juggle the extreme in their tight curled leaves.

If this is April there is a carrot cake on the back porch, The cream cheese frosting crystallizes before Marilyn’s birthday party. If this is April there is a reason to breathe in deeply. And listen to the moss playing on the bark of the Japanese maple. A five minute introduction to antlers. They are not brush. Or pieces of logs.

You can see them now, crisscrossing the grass in the snow.

Dreams us now. Behold, bystander: she was bending, seeking drying poison to stay the dragon. The pond reached out and lifted demons off the left shoulder. The water gurgled As they dropped in. A pond can hold a lot. The honeybees have nested in the South Wall. I hear a slow buzzing in morning louder every day; I listen to the back of the pond. My mind a dragonfly. My heart a bat in night.

Listening to water, to the concentric circles, to the wet dream that is April spreading into roots and over borage. What makes this North is day.

68

May, Queen of Ditch and Sewer Alice stares out on this thaw of pond.

Her pins reverse, her eyebrow up. The snow gone. This thaw reveals the brown grass. The bones the dogs have pulled out a deer’s flank a fawn’s spots, a cow’s matted tail: all the hallmarks of winter past.

The white and grey bones, the bits of shattered ankle keep the skeleton of winter with us into this weeping warmth, keep this day of mock April at its strongest. On the table of water. We read the cards: the three of pond the four of water the five of lake the six of inlet the seven of watering hole the eight of river the nine of underground pools we send to the queen of the ditch and the sewer.

69

Self Identification -La Muerte, a skeleton riding a white horse, change

The mourning dove drops the sticks on gravel, over and over. Again, she imagines that she is Nature.

The thought of being Nature comforts her far more than it should.

It is starting to rain snow, thunder, bitterness and mud.

She goes forward, not opening her umbrella, not pulling up her hood, only pooling the wetness around her neck, allowing it to ring.

She gives meaning to things which are not there. Snake bites, a nest of green feathers. A broken arrow.

What she finds erotic is not the storm, but the leaf unfurling from the giant bromeliad, the shock of green before the sun beats it.

The ant carries the blade: the shaft forgotten, the song broken.

Her mind, like a propeller, cuts against the inside of her cheeks.

She reverses into her life, the impact bruising her brain against the skull.

This rapid advancement into yesterday leaves her working only with scar tissue.

The rain slips between her lips. The past is present. The rain helmets her head, ringing in her ears, like the tin screws of a conquistador. The rain rusts her drums.

She hears only the screech and the swerve, “In the beginning‌â€? she remembers.

The hand slips her photographs of herself, images of the past like cookies crackle in her mouth, spoon-fed, the syncopation starts, she shakes and the cookies fall out from her teeth, uneaten. Now crumbs. She had been walking to herself.

When the sky opened, she was singing a song, when the clouds broke precipitation, perspiration, perpetuation, premonition, precognition.

No, none of that now. What she wants in this moment, besides poplar and ice, is the sun. Never live in memory. Never go back and eat there again.

Your teeth, yours truly, will snap backward in your mouth. Feed yourself, never let yourself be fed: shadows, and the inability to stand will result.

70

Rushed After Fall, Summer, Winter, more. Don't lie on a Sunday, wait until late Monday afternoon.

More than endurance, the message not to quit flaming, or to douse the fire. Reserved.

At 110 years old, the pond wrote a letter to send to itself at 240 and set the letter in the crotch of a maple.

The 96 year old pond wrote a letter back in time to its forty-four year old self, a sad sort of letter telling itself no mistakes, not to let them build a fence through because the wire would rust at the bottom, like the steeled barbs were now doing.

Delivered to the bottom, once the letter had dissolved, the lake kept the sealing wax tucked it in its roots, like a betrayal.

No cease fire. The barbed wire made a permanent musical staff on the floor of the pond, drunken notes, as if it were a drawing on a corroded door.

No way in. The pond was an out of tune piano, a glass and mirror harpsichord, a slipped piano, playing it was like being on the observation deck. No ferry here, no wait, only early arrival, only burning water, only balm.

71

Budge Guarded by a barbed wire fence, at the forbidden bank, I slip into an apron of water.

The pond is all morning, even at night, heel and toe in the swampy edge of the pond, slap ball change in the marshed sidewalk of the pond.

The pond sits in amber; witch time trapped, ordained.

The pond’s hour is dawn; the sun tipped into the tea cup of water, the mud bowl of land; they watch the words, drop one by one, the mother and father in tight suits, loud voices, and shorn hair. The mother and father caught in 3x5s with the grey background in a place where everyone must sit still for the click of the camera.

Even I, with the gaps in my teeth, my forced green suit and pixie hair. The clothes always too large the dust mites dotting the blonde i’s of hair. My grandfather died of an aneurism in an outdoor toilet in Palisade, Minnesota, leaving behind the stuttered legacy of a linguist, his verbiage repeated at the same time in several languages, leaving behind Spanish verbs, years of abuse and a flock of damaged children.

You have to get over the ditch, jump the friendly silver eye of the culvert, find the rose hips, the small pink wild roses, the yellow headed cowslips, the tangle of raspberries Find this place that in the best of times serves the Fall; anchors Summer, spits thorns in Spring, and seizes the cracked heart of Winter.

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Lure Mired, through the veil of mud and drizzled weed; the observed, and the unobservable. The pond watches, an uncomfortable water eye on me. This map of my movements; will this tarn witness weaken and drench me? Will it make me water? Will it wash map and mortar out of me?

Sand, return my footprint. Rock, rest my eyes. Sludge, muck me. Dirt, name me.

Mica, keep my skin. Quagmire, keep me safe. Marsh lost, bog lost, swamp found.

Slough on. Survey, this is a pond I can stand (in). This pond, I can stand.

Watching afternoon become dusk, Sandhill Crane become Trumpeter.

Swan, this pond my catch-all, a muddy hand bag clicked shut, the diamond and sapphire clasp dank, and mossed. This pond is my sole, my arch, the beginning of arms, the ends of fingers. The beginnings of feet.

Engaged, this joint of water. This pond my glass eye rolled downward in glazed stance.

This pond with its unfinished rafters, its washed-out grey heart, its crooked kitchen floor, is a martini glass with a swizzle stick, is rain, is an upside down umbrella painted with the Sistine Chapel, is the breath between rain and bead-sized hail, the space between frost, bones, and sun. This pond has made me an observer to the changes within myself. I gaze. I sift. I settle. I screen. This pond floats to weave. This pond opens and closes: a barbed palisade, a pitch wreath, a burnt bouquet.

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