Milkweed Editions

We’ll say unbelievable things
to each other in the early morning—

She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says,

Sharks bite fewer people each year than
New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.

Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks

Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.
To be the thing not touched by light (no, that’s not it)—
to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.

you with your 400 miles of interlocking caves that lead
only to more of you, tell me

ON A LAMPPOST LONG AGO
I don’t know what to think of first
in the list
of all the things that are disappearing: fishes, birds, trees, flowers, bees,
and languages too. They say that if historical rates are averaged,
a language will die every four months.
In the time it takes to say I love you, or move in with someone,
or admit to the child you’re carrying, all the intricate words
of a language become extinct.
There are too many things to hold in the palm of the brain.
Your father with Alzheimer’s uses the word thing to describe
many different nouns and we guess the word he means.
When we get it right, he nods as if it’s obvious.
When we get it wrong, his face closes like a fist.
Out walking in the neighborhood, there’s a wide metal lamppost
that has scratched into it “Brandy Earlywine loves
Jack Pickett” and then there come the hearts. The barrage of hearts
scratched over and over as if, just in case we have forgotten
the word love, we will know its symbol. As if Miss Earlywine
wanted us to know that—even after she and Mr. Pickett
have passed on, their real hearts stopped, the ones that don’t look
anything like those little symbols—they frantically, furiously,
late one night under the streetlight while their parents thought
they were asleep, inscribed onto the body of something like
a permanent tree, a heart—so that even after their bodies
have ceased to be bodies, their mouths no longer capable of words,
that universal shape will tell you how she felt, one blue evening,
long ago, when there were still 7,000 languages that named and honored
the plants and animals each in their
own way, when your father said thing and we knew what it meant,
and the bees were big and round and buzzing.

I’m thinking of how we make stories,
pluck them like beetles out of the air,
collect them, pin their glossy backs
to the board like the rows of stolen
beauties, dead, displayed at Isla Negra,
where the waves broke over us
and I still loved the country, wanted
to suck the bones of the buried.

The supermarket here is full of grass seed like spring
might actually come, but I don’t know. And you?
I heard from a friend that you’re still working on saving
words. All I’ve been working on is napping, and maybe
being kinder to others, to myself.

AGAINST BELONGING
It’s been six years since we moved here, green
of the tall grasses outstretched like fingers waving.
I remember the first drive in; the American beech,
sassafras, chestnut oak, yellow birch were just
plain trees back then. I didn’t know we’d stay long.
I missed the Sonoma coast line, the winding
roads that opened onto places called Goat Rock,
Furlong Gulch, Salmon Creek. Once, when I was
young, we camped out at Russian Gulch and learned
the names of all the grasses, the tide pool animals,
the creatures of the redwoods, properly identifying
seemed more important than science, more like
creation. With each new name, the world expanded.
I give names to everything now because it makes
me feel useful. Currently, three snakes surround our
house. One in front, one near the fire pit, and one
near the raised beds of beets and carrots. Harmless
Eastern garter snakes, small, but ever expanding.
I check on them each day, watch their round eyes
blink in the sun that fuels them. I’ve named them
so no one is tempted to kill them (a way of offering
reprieve, tenderness). But sometimes I feel them
moving around inside me, the three snakes hissing—
what cannot be tamed, what shakes off citizenship,
what draws her own signature with her body
in whatever dirt she wants.

There’s a hunger in me,
a need to watch something grow.

You ever think you could cry so hard
that there’d be nothing left in you, like
how the wind shakes a tree in a storm
until every part of it is run through with
wind?