Anatomy of a Home

Anatomy of a Home

On every wall, knotted pine 
bares lifelines.

Checks and splits flaw the wood 
beams where fibers compress 

into empty space. A daughter bites 
her graham cracker into the shape 

of a moon and laughs. A son fusses 
over a puzzle on the floor—piece 

by piece, bucks interlocking
on an unknown hill. They are waiting 

for the first flakes of another storm,
the baby to wake from her nap.
  
Outside, bald flashes of wood 
ache where ice fractured branches. 

Cells harden beneath the crack 
of bark, the way silica remains 

liquid as it is super-cooled into glass. 
A father is away at work—wind pulls 

and stretches the tree roots. 
A mother, the heartwood, alive

inside death, log on log into fire.

She Was

She was mother. She was 
body in house, dedicated 

to bleach until shine 
spilled across porcelain. 	

She was feminist—flame 
struggling to break from candle. 

She swallowed a pill 
that removed herself from her-self. 	

She joined ordinary people 
in the bottom-up insurgency. 

She plucked delicate excesses; 
untied God from her body 

and let her skin spill 
in the purple penitential light. 

She was problematic 
to the coddled American mind. 

She had the eye of a woman looking 
to leap from her own painting.

She was not old or wise, 
and no longer pretty. 

She was a waterless 
blessing. An empty garden. 

And when she fucked 
she was man and woman, 	

crashing her-selves on herself,
glad to be crushed by her own redundancy.

She was suffering—
cinder flashing heat back into fire.

Selva Oscura

I.	Purgatorio 

Should you decide that I might be saved, consider the ink 
of my wicked pride—my white overexposed nakedness.

I am an unplaceable woman. A tired bitch 
announced in heavy footfalls down the stairs. 

The bird of my lover’s heart sags on the vine like fruit
over-fattening between two worlds. 

The cuckoo clock teases out time, with every door slap 
my old dog throws a sigh from his dirty floor bed.  

I want my dog to die. His rancid fur stains oil in the hardwood,
his knowing eyes beg me to let him perish. 

I thought I understood love, but it is just a feral 
need of the body, a tedious, aging thirst. 

Chemicals flush through mazes—a regular sickness
reaching out, but my pen needs to make a name of it.

If Hell is fire then may heaven be a cool wet wind 
at the car window for my dog’s final drive.

In the middle of this dark wood, let leaves drop 
into dumb air. Let me glitter between the two halves.

II.	Paradiso

The ash of my dog is not what I expected.
There are shards of bone—fragments in the fragment of his weight,

I let myself say the world has no meaning. 
The words leak effortlessly, like blood rushing from a wound. 

I thought myself more a woman than lie down 
lie down. The man has needs, the man has chemicals too.

The children are each their own empyrean. It is enough to have 
them, fleeting as it may be, like an unkindness of ravens, and then none.

My dead dog was handed back like a bag of flour. I placed him into 
a small box on the shelf. I lie to the children and say he’s still here. 

Maybe we are no more than our human peaks. The heaven of us lives 
in the swells and stretches before the inevitable crack. 

I stroke the cedar box of my dog’s dust. Good
old boy. My purest friend. I do not feel you at all.

A child’s hand fits into a mother’s like two gears clinked together.
Two gears clink together and that is the still-point-poem before the turn.