Poetry Blog

There was a time when my heart beat with the drums and the fire singed the hair off my skin when I danced too closely to the flames. My breasts were heavy, the tips of them dark like good liquor, like the earth after the rain. I danced for your eyes, I drew my hands over my hips, over the ripeness of my body. I was fruiting, I was full, my bare feet slapped against the ground, I was a woman, I was a woman.

I lace my boots, hook my old leather chaps into place and feel their solid heaviness over my thighs, hear the comforting sway of the fringe. I am going into the fog, I ride with my hat tipped low, with rain beading on mane, leather, felt, skin and soaking through slowly. I climb the old hills, once orchards, and we break through each weft of fog to ascend to the next. Til we reach the top and take a rest, our breath steaming into clouds, to survey the whole land laid out before us. The world is all a-hush, all colors soft, this whole place made out by brush strokes. I look and I know belonging so profound it cannot be captured in words, but only in the water droplets suspended in a pony’s mane. In the bit rolled in his mouth, in the low call of a distant bird, everything in and of its self. So home lives in my bones, so is beauty to me. My yearning heart will always return me here, through loss and grief I only want to climb into the saddle and ride into the fog.

I recall the scent of woodsmoke As the covers shifted, as I stirred to find you –searching me out Warm, hot skin met with mine, hardly awake I gasped –Quiet, you said Shh… You hushed me with your kisses and smoked me with your skin And brought me to the fire with slow, slow burning.

I think I got a flat tire driving to that lonely spot up in the woods so that we could make love. I’ve loved you over county lines and in the backseat of my 1995 Buick Regal and with the glovebox turned up in my S10 Chevy. We’re good at fogging up the windows, and its been going on so long that we’ve switched from leaving the air on to turning on the heat.

Damn everyone one of you who says I have to move on, forget, start anew. Damn you for the tetherless nomads that you are, for the faithless, who’s heart lays only in the fire that can be started anew each day, no matter the land or man. The soil here, here! Is dark, is rich, is fertile I will not move, give me thread, I will stitch a wound shut sooner than dull the knife that gave it.

I was raised in lands that have watched man come and go in his different skins and wars. In mountains so old, they have grown round. I have tasted each season’s delights from the blackberries hidden like jewels in their thickets to the golden chanterelle crowned at the base of an oak. I have overturned fawns in orchard grass, seen the gleam of horns high in the woodline and heard the coyotes calling to one another in want of a mate on cold January nights. On horseback and on foot I have kicked up the dust of red shale, and disappeared into the fog that blankets the rolling hillsides. I would that this flesh becomes the black soil of the hollows, that my eyes close on the mountains. And then that I may be the chattering fox squirrel, the sleek doe with her soft eyes and wary nose, that each time I am snuffed out my soul rises up like smoke to live out another life time in this land.

Who would you have been? Would you have been my little blue eyed baby? Would you have grown tall like him, talked like him, had my spark, our fire? My breasts are still heavy from expecting you, but the valley between them runs deep all the way to this plateau of a stomach.

I bring myself to bed and touch the curve of your ear and hear your breath on my pillow and lay down thinking of what might be. A little house hidden away from the road, a porch with a rocking chair and a garden out back, the tomatoes heavy and round, the corn reaching to the sun. There is a quiet gelding in the pasture, within the split rail fence that we put up together, and a few dozen chickens making their way across the yard. I’m not sure if our working hands would wear rings, or if we would share our names, but there might be a baby to share your eyes and my nose. I would carry her in a little basket on my back as I tended the garden, the chickens, as I milked the dairy goat, as I pruned my young orchard, and brushed out the quiet gelding’s dark coat. I know this will probably not be, but I lay in your arms and think of where to put the cabbages.

This is about my mother, this is about how she still salts and eats pieces of raw potato while cooking dinner. This is about one of the smartest and unhappiest people that I know. (Where do you think I got it from?) My mother is beautiful. She is forty-five years old and a heavy drinker. I don’t think I’ll look that good at her age, even without the drinking. She’s on her third marriage, second husband. (She married my father twice.) This is about how I still have to force ‘I love you’ out of my throat because she hurt me more than I ever knew people who loved you could. This is about cleaning her blood off the floor and watching the dogs lick up the vomit. This is about the dent in the kitchen sink from a beer bottle that missed its intended target. This is about a lot of things, I guess. She put her hands on me, she pulls me into her arms and tells me I’m a smart girl. I help her feed the pigs. She loves animals, just like me.

What does the seed care for the earth? You till this ground and I tell you, “Beware, this is fertile land, what you plant may grow.

When you are acutely aware, and have experienced the truth that nothing lasts, you will do everything you can to savor it while it does. You’ll trail your fingers over his things that morning and make note of it all. Turning back one last time at an emptied house. Making the best goodbye that you can, because you know it will be the last. You will even try to remember the person that you are, walking out the door. A lifetime spent making hard copies out of memories.

I grew wild on the slope of this mountain like the thistle weed and the blackberries. I can tell you where the mint blossoms at the first touch of warmth, along sandstone banks of the crick who’s source I have traced all the way up the hollow to the great boulder from which it bubbles forth.

You think this horse needs reins, well honey, you forgot about the bit. And so help me God, I’ll take it between my teeth and drive us both over this cliff.

I am good at being good, you don’t have to worry about me. I’ll keep my troubles swept up and under the rug while encouraging you to brings yours to light. Let’s talk, let me help, that’s the only way I know to help myself. I take care of you, because if I can do that, surely I don’t need to take care of me.

God, don’t you know that I am only a curer of skins? A butcher, a poor husbandman. Don’t give me love, I cannot hold it, surely it was meant for someone with softer hands. There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just a little head shy, a little heart sore, a little wanting to run to the ends of the earth before I see that want in another person’s eyes-- He told me that smoke follows beauty, but really it follows the wind and I could be gone just as easily. And I want him, but I don’t want to need him. He is like a force of goddamned nature, and I have known what is it to have a thunderstorm weep in your arms. And he speak of futures that I can describe, but not promise.

I think I was a musician once, I have tried to be in this life, but only chased the tail ends of what it is to understand the beat, the pulse, these chords, my fingers find these keys so familiar and my heart lurches in my chest at the brush of something close to knowing. I have been carried along in the rhythm, the great unspoken conversation of an orchestra, and faltered, stumbled, only barely kept up. I am resigned to my listening.

There will be moments that shake you. You are a little girl, curled up on the picnic table with a mug of tea in your hands, watching the lighting over the mountain. You are not quite a girl or a woman, but you are in love, watching the lightning flash, soundless over the city, and it is like you, seen but not heard. You are a woman, and you are making up for lost time in your dark bedroom with him, who’s never hesitated to speak up. You speak up.