Spirit Double

who is doing all this work on this old house?

painting & repairing & paying to have it repaired

a last-gasp house I’ll no doubt be pried out of 

when sense or mobility deserts me, yet this week

I search with an electronic tool for wall studs

pound finishing nails into baseboards my brother

ripped to the chosen width, I measure, saw, & sand

paint & repaint, all to better the appearance of

hide the faults of a hundred-year-old house

I trust will last decades longer than I will

no paint or boards or nails can slow my ruin

deepening fissures fill with tears from eyes

too slack to hold them, not grief but leakage

every night in dreams I play my younger self

When Leaves Turn

the cleft between two wooded slopes

becomes a crowded spill of colors

yellow & orange, yellow & ochre & red

intense & dense as a Bach fugue

notes falling & rising, voice by voice

a rippling wave where cause & effect 

dissolve & integrate, where utter love

pours from me to the leaves

where leaves cascade love at me

love for what the universe can do

One Being

                   — in memory of Hannah Arendt

the raccoon curls as if sleeping, nose tucked

toward a belly fat from summer feed

the lustrous black-ridged tail of a gray fox

skunk’s pungence, hawk’s wing

twigged legs of an antlered deer

these bloodied remnants soil the road

    as inescapable a part of ourselves

    as the snail’s shell is to its occupant

out of the raccoon’s eyes looks

a Palestinian child, a questioning gaze

as child & raccoon endure their mutual fate

curl & are curled as if sleeping

the two as one being, the raccoon no less

no more than the Palestinian child

    violence changes the world, but the most

    probable change is a more violent world

Barbarians

I can’t say I’ve paid a coyote

perilous trek to the Texas border

I can’t say I’m crossing the Mediterranean

small boat with ninety others

I can’t say I’ve been confined twenty years

tin shack in a barbed-wire camp

I can’t say I was driven from my homeland

colonial fiat favoring European Jews

I can’t say bombs level my city

rubble my building, maim my children

what I can say is I’m pretending to be safe

here in the global north

I can say I forgo meat, shun plastics

& won’t fight back

when barbarians — people just like me

burst through the gates

 

Mothers of . . . Daughters of . . .

my mother fed me stories

bite by bite with my daily rusk

word by word, hour by hour

a shield, a siege, a bow, an oar

I listened while she dangled treats

sang the runes, embraced

me in her shawl, wrapped me warm

through Mediterranean nights

long before I conned meaning

I prattled verses back to her

courtesy, feasting, kings & slaves

quarrels staged as sea voyages & killing

animals too, hunting dogs, birds & bats

sheep & swine & the hecatombs — 

not numbers, not graves, but oxen

raised for the altar, tributes to gods

once I understood, I added beats

a scar, a rooted bed, a loom like my mother’s

& I her midnight unraveler

proving what I must remember

those were days when I saw light

saw rather than felt the break of day

you strum the lyre, she said, you hear

you feel, you sing, you will never want

so I became one of the chosen 

daughters of the mothers’ line

our fingers webbed with weaving

we relate so the rest may see

Absent Life

snow brings proof of what’s rarely seen

though here all year — rabbits, bobcat, deer —

crisscrossing the yard from dusk to dawn

leading non-human lives out of sight

except for chewed flora, scat heaps

the disappearance of chicken bones

I toss out the back door, I count how many

toes there are, wonder at their unwatched

yet vital goings on, how they survive

despite us, how they hope we disappear

Royal Fare

wind tosses reddening sumac, stirs the pale green

milkweed pods — fat, & pointed at both ends

like fish bladders, like grapefruit pulp, but large

as giants’ thumbs & stubbled, like scrotums

vesicles of ripening germ — as days pass they darken

dry, & split open, spill & spread their bounty

porcelain-white fluff, each tuft bound to a small

brown seed that wind, or barring wind, bumptious I 

scatter across my yard to sprout in spring

leaf in summer, proffer monarchs a daily spread