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
every Palestinian child killed
is someone I will never know
you might say
I wouldn’t know them anyway
because before they’d have grown
I’ll have died, & yet
we might have exchanged
fleeting gusts of air, theirs
blown here from Rafah in Gaza, mine
blown there from small town Vermont
they bombed into fragments
picked off by snipers
skin & bones in a mother’s arms
while I slow & slip & sink
& succumb to old age
every you & I, we are the same
Ovid’s creation story is so predictably male —
natus homo est — I expect Ovid saw homo
as a white Roman male, a norm from which
other colors & genders deviate. A priori,
I reject homo & translate Ovid’s phrase as
humans are born, not being snootish enough
to opt for humanity is born, also not quite yet
determined to feminize Ovid, nudge him
toward woman is born — problematic, since
my preferred future is a gender-irrelevant
world where woman is as impertinent as man.
November days I scour the woods
for windfall, blowdown . . . young trees
the high winds tore or toppled, old trunks
not yet rotted into fresh earth, uprooted
white pine, its bark gone, pale dry limbs
I snap off, drag & carry, align & pack down
twigs & limbs & trunks all rise into great
piles — over-winter dens for skunks & voles
weasels, rabbits, & mice . . . a snow-clad
mound mimes an igloo — now picture
feasts, song & dance, the partnering off
plumping wombs, young in fur-lined nests
such imaginings might be, or might not
possibly my brush piles simply rot
I grasp the thorny-stalked, lobe-leafed
plants near their base & yank up
the roots, shallow & widely branched
they leap from the soil, a wad of tangle
no flowers, no fruit, too many thorns
sheath all but the oldest stalks, thorns
eager to snag my skin when I walk
the woods, so I weed them out, as if
I deserve to shape the woods, decide
which plants live, which plants die
which fallen limbs must be tossed
onto piles, which young trees lopped
the woods observe me, endure me
someday soon they know I’ll be gone
759 species identified
more than 300 species extinct
they cannot travel backward
their shells are already fossils
snails emit & follow slime
preferably slime of kin or friend
Hawaiians hear snails sing
a sound like crickets
maybe it’s the sound of wind
crossing an open operculum
snails are hermaphrodites, not she
nor he but they . . . also they mate
one’s sperm for the other’s egg
sperm to use now or cache
snails lay eggs, snails give birth
newborns are fleshy, flabby
fused to the calcium-carbonate
seed of a spiraling shell
that grows larger & larger
a mobile home that roams
the snail’s Lilliputian foraging
space, until the snail dies
shells hundreds of millions of
years old . . . traces of lost feet
from species more durable
than humans will ever be
the wait staff sets checkered tables with salt
pepper, ketchup, napkins, & a loaf of white bread
what we called Wonder Bread when I was a child
the loaves are sealed in plastic, & we never
open them, never eat a slice, but work crews do
as do ginormous fat men, we wonder aloud
whether open loaves are replaced between diners
why eat bread when once you pay for your meal
you can go back for more as many times as you want
brisket, ribs, chicken, red rice, butter beans, fried okra
banana pudding, sheet cake . . . grease, salt, & sugar
I try not to go more than once a quarter, friends go
once a week, do work crews go every day?
afterward I feel queasy, maybe a slice of white bread
would settle my stomach, when I pass the Dukes sign
I turn my eyes to the other side of Folly Road
Premier Medical, Charleston Fire Department
Station 13 . . . places I could stop & beg for relief
my brother dug a deep, then deeper hole
the backyard hole to nowhere
what kind of a family allows for that kind of hole?
through the earth to the other side, he said
like the cop who dug until his shovel
hit something solid, the wrist of a murdered woman
if you dig long enough you might find the why
. . . accident, crime, bad blood, old age . . .
knowing the why doesn’t relieve the ache
from the window I watched my brother dig
or I stood close but not too close to the rim of the hole
in case he decided to throw dirt at me
he was covered in dirt while I was taught to be clean
it took me ten years to relearn dirty
to throw sod root-side up into trenches
pile dark soil on top, my first growing season
. . . babies, vegetables, extra-marital tomfoolery . . .
when photographs are black & white
blood might be paint, or vice versa
