3/1/2016

"* The river is rising
      over the thawed ground
   and the banksides. When you come you bring
      an egg dyed lavender.
   We shout along our bank to hear
our voices returning from the hills to meet us.
   We need the landscape to repeat us.
[...]
      In the debris lay
   starlings, dead. Near the park’s birdrun
      we surprised one day
   a proud, tan-spatted, buff-brown pigeon.
      In my hands she flapped so
   fearfully that I let her go.
Her keeper came. And we helped snarl her in a net.
   You bring things I’d as soon forget.

     You raise into my head
   a Fall night that I came once more
      to sit on your bed;
   sweat beads stood out on your arms and fore-
      head and you wheezed for breath,
   for help, like some child caught beneath
its comfortable wooly blankets, drowning there.
   Your lungs caught and would not take the air.*"

wd snodgrass, 'heart's needle'

here it is and here i was
succinctly woman,
growing into my title as one
never deciding whether or not

to be the one to upturn her nose cruelly
or ground her feet into the dirt shyly.
i revel in my past

and i believe it happened, yes
reading back at old letters
two years prior to the day

looking for any
auspicious auguries,
anything that would have alluded to

this swollen self.
winter this year lasted
maybe a day

i cannot decide
if that is good for me or
for the earth,

but i have never been
an
excellent oracle.