We are so much
alike, you misplaced, me
put in mine,
your dress of dirt,
me, a suit
washed in
carnival flies. Maybe
we deserve nothing
other than
each other,
you who
delivered me
here, me
delivering you there,
I say,
putting words in your mouth,
worms rhyming
silly rhyme
wetly
glistening in
our heads.
Are you the lake of two rivers
and, melting, is this the river speaking
for the light?
Is highway 60 ok with
your beauty?
What I mean to say is,
is your face breaking apart
across the car’s Tamarack glass,
opening up like
the womb of a moose
taken down by wolves on
the first day of Spring,
already pregnant with sun
and ice and asphalt.
She wakes from the dream of
sun, eager, blind, devouring true heat,
words to him intent, bristling still,
tiny endings of sight.
His poetry for her, she had said,
would scour down
to carpet trails to rooms,
stairwell to hall, to cool basement
scenting furnace hum,
the twitch of winter glass,
clock in room,
expressionless mouth of
door.
She does not see a man
she stripped down to
a kind of sun, or dark star
crossing dawn into
the borders of her skin.
As we travel in its direction
we are carried for awhile
by stray things
we collect of each other.
This is how I’m reminded
about the togetherness of lost things,
that they resemble each other,
pulling being an expression of reach,
sleep an anchor for darkness
lowered into the sky
at the bottom of a well.
I don’t know if either of us gets there,
the one the Mennonites dug,
but maybe we are simple pail
tugged out from the earth,
each grasp we make
brimming in the other.
This map flows river after river,
creeks popping through them, like bent nails.
I read its mind on Evelyn again,
wind stealing it from your hand,
stuffing it down its pocket of rapids.
I’d go to those rivers once.
It didn’t matter,
you’d never stop finding me.
So, I believed that what the tongues
and grooves of water had to say
was true,
that you loved a wilderness
more than I could ever.
You’d just come to me,
you, your invisible map,
the one
only I could see,
so that nothing, I thought,
would steal it.
This funny place,
every place somewhere else.
How, I love you, turns a face,
changes minds, becomes a back.
Mine, too,
into this river spine of loneliness
up freezing ground,
snow-warmed, underneath.
Here in Pikangikum territory in late August
your accent is the summer of pinaceae,
azimuth, canvasback, azure
and the lines of you scrawl on my back
and the hair of you spreads roots over blunt Obsidian,
and wrinkles smooth Anishinaabe lakes
northwest of Pikangikum territory in late August
as westerlies fill the cheeks of stratocumulus,
heavy-set, blueset as slate. But, this is not love, you state.
We must wait until our bones are stepping stones
set in waterskins, and scars and bruises
are rubbed in arrowheads of paint ending on a brush;
in other words, an eyelash that winces turpentine sting,
weeps on the shoulders of words
their bittersweet scent of juniper
giving up to us all we mean by that.
I pass your house
as morning fades in long reeds of smoke,
as transcendence returns steadily to its old fate.
I’ve hidden things we’ve misplaced there.
Returning now to them,
would the lips remember their directions
under the scent of bread in your hair,
or of those first chickadees
who seemed to believe, more or less,
in the beatitude of their seeds,
like blackberries in hedges of snow
outside a backyard window?
Or, of you and I, for that matter,
would they sense the instinct of grace,
which remembers all and forgets,
and like all imperfect things is
a simple air that, first, senses us?
The melt water on the window.
The snow settled on the rooftops.
My hand resting on your breast.
The heart is a strange room.
This evening I walked you to your car,
watched the headlights go,
the engine setting into the scent of night.
I switched the light off over the front steps
and in that moment,
while the snow still glowed,
like some new planet,
I glimpsed the footsteps of this shadow,
forever returning, endlessly leaving,
as if it knew better to trust the light.
