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.

‍

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.

‍

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.