in one liminal patch
I find Morchella americana
twenty-two morels
such labyrinthine folds
& Arisaema triphyllum
a jack-in-the-pulpit
its folded-over hood still
hiding its striped interior
they emerge beside
dread invasives — garlic
mustard, dame’s rocket —
the few greens I’m willing
to pull, as if I ruled
this wild, this woods rim
where I heap cat litter
& tissues & egg shells
heaps I hide under
wood chips gleaned
from trees I’ve downed
without me these
two acres would soon
carpet my house
I listen three nights
when a creature
not one of the three of us
prowls the dark
until one morning
a scratch, a scrape
becomes my cat
carrying a mouse
the tail dangles
a white neck shines
the cat trots outside
my other cat follows
the end is a different story
the burden of driving the hundred miles
to visit friends or family, to consult on a project
— that length of time, those dangerous roads —
so one stays home, looks out the same windows
onto the same trees, grass, driveway, road
yet what comfort the known brings, the one mug
filled with the favorite tea . . . I am most at risk
between five & seven am, the time when I wake
& make tea & read headlines reporting the latest
obscenities — South Carolina executes a man
by firing squad, Israel kills 87 Palestinians
our dumb fuck president spews nonsense
enables morons, deports & kills people —
yet the day begins, I divert myself, Homer
diverts me, my ignorance consoles me
the morning after my high school graduation
a moving van pulls up out front
of our New Jersey house
United! it proclaims
& while movers maneuver
the contents of our house down the walk
up the ramp into the dark tunnel
stacked with blankets
strung with belts
& while my mother supervises
the know-it-all yes’m no’m blue-jumpsuited crew
I assemble a collection
of what I might need for the rest of my life
I’m seventeen
& I’m not moving to DC though she thinks I am
no, today is I win (& lose), game over
get out, get out for good
drive away in my two-door pale-blue Pontiac
dressed in black
& strung with pearls, it takes her
six weeks to find me cleaning a toilet in a stranger’s house
no, I won’t come with you, won’t pretend
you have any hold over me, won’t endure
one more day of your husband’s (my father’s)
drug- & drink-addled rage
she drives off
I pass another night deep in the park, locked in my car
yes, we too suffer while we
watch & tend to the old & ill
tend them when they know
& we know it’s end game
they tremble, dribble, moan
embarrass & soil themselves
still, we don’t deliver the dose
are we making them pay
for what they’ve done to us?
only nature or some kinder god
grants them their release
later we advertise how long
we forced them to endure
I am in paradise
not banished but instead
where I would most wish to be
because of fragments
I live outside the outer world
inside my own world
though I don’t knit
I’m knitting . . . long ago I wove
my body my loom
the sussuration of S
iffiness of a short I
strength & resilience of an L
scissor snip of a K
silk blouses always
pretending to slide off my shoulders
silk blouses & trousers
I gave away
when I threw off the salaryman slog
& moved to Hawaii
off grid, forty acres of rainforest
rain, mud, feral pigs
rooting outside my windows
the four-thousand meters of silk
inside every silk moth cocoon
I am hallucinating the out of doors
because I am inside until further notice
every window in my house brings me
light, bare trees, snow on the ground
indoors is this ugly aluminum walker
in my lap a book about taking the walks
Henry David Thoreau took . . . Cape Cod
Mt Katahdin, Mt Wachusett . . . nearly
two centuries ago people truly walked
New England out of doors was country
from here to there & yet a farther there
as far as one might walk in a day, a week
a month . . . one day I might be back up
on both of my feet & out of doors
she tells me about a boy who comes to school
filthy — clothes, skin, hair — I mean filthy, she says
I wonder, does he never wash? has he no shower?
no parents? no home? what brings him to school
every day? he’s one of six students in her
“intervention” group, students who are behind
who do not learn, who cannot, she says, learn
the parts of speech, though all of them can speak
they know how to assemble verb, noun, adjective
so in fact they know parts of speech as a dog
knows a hydrant, a cat, its owner, without
giving names to any of them — a dirty silent
boy, who agrees to sit at the group table the day
another boy, the one who misbehaves, is absent
each Palestinian child killed
is someone I will never know
& though you might say
I wouldn’t know them anyway
because before they’d have grown up
I’ll be dead, still, we might have exchanged
fleeting bursts of air, theirs
blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine
flown there from Salisbury in Vermont
world travelers, sibling orphans
they bombed into fragments
or found frozen in rain-soaked tents
I shriveled inside worn garments
we who die in our killing times
