A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:
imbibing the silence,
you stare at spruce needles:
there's no sound of a leaf blower,
no sign of a black bear;
a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
against an aspen trunk;
a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.
You only spot the rabbit's ears and tail:
when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;
the world of being is like this gravel:
you think you own a car, a house,
this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and stood at Gibraltar,
but you possess nothing.
Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
and, in this stillness,
starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail.
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Coming from a place where we meandered mornings and met quail, scrub jay, mockingbird, i knew coyote, like everyone else, i knew
cactus, knew tumbleweed, lichen on the rocks and pill bugs beneath, rattlers sometimes, the soft smell of sage and the ferment of cactus pear. coming from this place, from a place where grass might grow greener on the hillside in winter than in any yard, where, the whole rest of the year, everything i loved, chaparral pea, bottle brush tree, jacaranda, mariposa, pinyon and desert oak, the kumquat in the back garden and wisteria vining the porch, the dry grass whispering long after the last rains, raccoons in and out of the hills, trash hurled by the hottest wind, the dry grass tall now and golden, lawn chairs,
eucalyptus, everything, in a place we knew, every thing, we knew, little and large and mine and ours, except horror, all of it, everything could flame up that quickly, could flare and be gone.
The wagon and mule, Time and Eternity, stop to change places. Their lean and slope-back shadow, my reservation. The moon moves like infested flour. At the river, bloody victories meet bloody massacres. They tell each other about their dead.
Grandmothers eat buffalo instead of hamburger. After supper, guitar chords bite through gravestone. Then the one grandfather interrupts, walking
off with his own skull as a lantern into the polar night. Snowshoe hare cleans the ears of the sleeping and leaves prophetic dreams.
It is quiet. One can hear the hair of the dead grow. The woods, itself, dressed in frozen children’s clothes. Few of the living disguise themselves as pawned beadwork.
A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:
imbibing the silence,
you stare at spruce needles:
there's no sound of a leaf blower,
no sign of a black bear;
a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
against an aspen trunk;
a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.
You only spot the rabbit's ears and tail:
when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
but when it stops, it blends in again;
the world of being is like this gravel:
you think you own a car, a house,
this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.
Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
and stood at Gibraltar,
but you possess nothing.
Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
and, in this stillness,
starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.
One of the first experiments we give children teaches the three states of water: liquid, vapor, and ICE at the border storing children in hieleras, short-term detention facilities known as iceboxes because it’s so cold you can see your breath as it transforms from vapor into liquid and ice.
Why? a child on the floor asks.
Our bodies are mostly water and the water inside them is the same temperature as our bodies, around 98.6 degrees, but the icebox is much colder so when a child exhales a warm, saturated breath, it becomes dew, and when it is cooled even further, condenses to minuscule droplets of liquid and ice, and this, child, is the cloud we see.
Some children are given two apples a day, which helps them keep time.
When it comes to the human bones, it’s hard not to admire the rib cage that holds my heart like it’s an animal.
Still, if I had to name just one favorite, I’m torn between the hip and the jaw.
Imagine the invention of the wheel and then the waterwheel, the color wheel, the spinning wheel for turning threads into blankets.
Next lesson: there are five basic needs—water, air, food, sleep, shelter.
I admire the moving parts.
The evolution of the hip decoupled walking from breathing so we can run at sunset toward each other or away from fire.
The bones of the hips are winged; if I flashed a picture quickly before you like pornography, you might mistake it for an emperor moth, which is one way to enter the world, headfirst through a body attracted to light.
The history of hips frees the hands for holding a baby, rocking a baby, holding your child’s eyes near your eyes at the distance the eyes first can see.
The jawbone gives us each a face.
It was the hard winter she came,
frozen larks plummeting through the gloam like falling stars,
each pail in the yard a slattern’s looking glass.
Each dusk, the house cobwebbed by creeping frost,
my husband slipped like a knife from an oyster,
my sons nestled like dormice in their cots,
I stood at my black window and oh
the cold it pressed upon me like a lover,
held its hands to my throat, my knees.
She came first through the trees:
a small glint amongst the poplars,
hoarfrost dripping from the velvet nubs of their antlers,
leaping fast to a shuddering pillar of flame,
her pelvis a cradle of jeweled tinder,
her ribs white kindling. A holy thing—
such furious unblossoming—and something profane.
I pressed my eye to the glass, the crackling dark,
saw her heart catch light,
blackbirds flap frantic from the forks of trees—
—woke shivering, sweat between my breasts,
my tongue in my teeth.
Every night then she came
in the stolen hours between caring and dream,
the children vanished, the drudging chaos of day
put to sleep.
I have no words to tell of the shapes she scorched,
the frozen lock, the copper key,
but that heat licked me raw as a wild love,
cracked the ice on my ribs and tossed in a flare.
All my life I have been a good woman,
compliant, neat, my children’s snow boots polished,
each snowflake of ash swept clean from my step.
I’ve worn obedience like a uniform,
the hoof of the iron cooling in my grate.
Yet I riled in the witching hour, tongue glittering.
My darling, I whispered to my own dry bones,
for what do you burn?
Three moons she has been absent,
though I wait at my window, the chill persisting, presaging snow,
and my longing rises hopeless as the carp in the pool.
I don’t know where she is living
or if she lives at all—
with women nursing in fevered sheets
or scrubbing floors until their knuckles ignite?
But by dark, when my sons sail the black cut
of sleep, and frost lays its terrible lace
upon the grass, when I am alone with my fretting,
with my dreams like black pearls in the clam of my mouth,
I press my fists to that tenderest wound—my soul—
and Christ how I burn.
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook.
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”
“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.,
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail.
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”
“It seems to me,” said Booker T.—
“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
I, too, am America.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Coming from a place where we meandered mornings and met quail, scrub jay, mockingbird, i knew coyote, like everyone else, i knew
cactus, knew tumbleweed, lichen on the rocks and pill bugs beneath, rattlers sometimes, the soft smell of sage and the ferment of cactus pear. coming from this place, from a place where grass might grow greener on the hillside in winter than in any yard, where, the whole rest of the year, everything i loved, chaparral pea, bottle brush tree, jacaranda, mariposa, pinyon and desert oak, the kumquat in the back garden and wisteria vining the porch, the dry grass whispering long after the last rains, raccoons in and out of the hills, trash hurled by the hottest wind, the dry grass tall now and golden, lawn chairs,
eucalyptus, everything, in a place we knew, every thing, we knew, little and large and mine and ours, except horror, all of it, everything could flame up that quickly, could flare and be gone.
The wagon and mule, Time and Eternity, stop to change places. Their lean and slope-back shadow, my reservation. The moon moves like infested flour. At the river, bloody victories meet bloody massacres. They tell each other about their dead.
Grandmothers eat buffalo instead of hamburger. After supper, guitar chords bite through gravestone. Then the one grandfather interrupts, walking
off with his own skull as a lantern into the polar night. Snowshoe hare cleans the ears of the sleeping and leaves prophetic dreams.
It is quiet. One can hear the hair of the dead grow. The woods, itself, dressed in frozen children’s clothes. Few of the living disguise themselves as pawned beadwork.
One of the first experiments we give children teaches the three states of water: liquid, vapor, and ICE at the border storing children in hieleras, short-term detention facilities known as iceboxes because it’s so cold you can see your breath as it transforms from vapor into liquid and ice.
Why? a child on the floor asks.
Our bodies are mostly water and the water inside them is the same temperature as our bodies, around 98.6 degrees, but the icebox is much colder so when a child exhales a warm, saturated breath, it becomes dew, and when it is cooled even further, condenses to minuscule droplets of liquid and ice, and this, child, is the cloud we see.
Some children are given two apples a day, which helps them keep time.
When it comes to the human bones, it’s hard not to admire the rib cage that holds my heart like it’s an animal.
Still, if I had to name just one favorite, I’m torn between the hip and the jaw.
Imagine the invention of the wheel and then the waterwheel, the color wheel, the spinning wheel for turning threads into blankets.
Next lesson: there are five basic needs—water, air, food, sleep, shelter.
I admire the moving parts.
The evolution of the hip decoupled walking from breathing so we can run at sunset toward each other or away from fire.
The bones of the hips are winged; if I flashed a picture quickly before you like pornography, you might mistake it for an emperor moth, which is one way to enter the world, headfirst through a body attracted to light.
The history of hips frees the hands for holding a baby, rocking a baby, holding your child’s eyes near your eyes at the distance the eyes first can see.
The jawbone gives us each a face.
It was the hard winter she came,
frozen larks plummeting through the gloam like falling stars,
each pail in the yard a slattern’s looking glass.
Each dusk, the house cobwebbed by creeping frost,
my husband slipped like a knife from an oyster,
my sons nestled like dormice in their cots,
I stood at my black window and oh
the cold it pressed upon me like a lover,
held its hands to my throat, my knees.
She came first through the trees:
a small glint amongst the poplars,
hoarfrost dripping from the velvet nubs of their antlers,
leaping fast to a shuddering pillar of flame,
her pelvis a cradle of jeweled tinder,
her ribs white kindling. A holy thing—
such furious unblossoming—and something profane.
I pressed my eye to the glass, the crackling dark,
saw her heart catch light,
blackbirds flap frantic from the forks of trees—
—woke shivering, sweat between my breasts,
my tongue in my teeth.
Every night then she came
in the stolen hours between caring and dream,
the children vanished, the drudging chaos of day
put to sleep.
I have no words to tell of the shapes she scorched,
the frozen lock, the copper key,
but that heat licked me raw as a wild love,
cracked the ice on my ribs and tossed in a flare.
All my life I have been a good woman,
compliant, neat, my children’s snow boots polished,
each snowflake of ash swept clean from my step.
I’ve worn obedience like a uniform,
the hoof of the iron cooling in my grate.
Yet I riled in the witching hour, tongue glittering.
My darling, I whispered to my own dry bones,
for what do you burn?
Three moons she has been absent,
though I wait at my window, the chill persisting, presaging snow,
and my longing rises hopeless as the carp in the pool.
I don’t know where she is living
or if she lives at all—
with women nursing in fevered sheets
or scrubbing floors until their knuckles ignite?
But by dark, when my sons sail the black cut
of sleep, and frost lays its terrible lace
upon the grass, when I am alone with my fretting,
with my dreams like black pearls in the clam of my mouth,
I press my fists to that tenderest wound—my soul—
and Christ how I burn.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.