Eat the Sleepless Nights

Villa de Borghese

I could sand with the highest grit paper I could think of and it still
wouldn’t match the smoothness of Bernini’s sculptures. Wood bends
easier to will than stone, yet he managed to make marble look like
the palest human skin, or hips still in motion, for god’s sake his chiseling
of a pillow appears softer than the one lodged under my head each night.

He, too, found his talents in the shadow of his father’s frame.
From my own, I was taught how to name wood by a smell or a grain
pattern and, even now, some of what I build requires two sets of hands,
and my father offers his willingly, still eager to teach me lessons
I often don’t know I need to learn. In these moments I do my best

to slow down time as the younger Bernini did in Apollo and Daphne,
The Rape of Persephone, in David. He captures a young man
before he became a legend, that fated rock still wrapped tight in its sling.
I can feel the useless momentum of Persephone against the hungry grip
of Pluto, hell hound breath hot on her heels. A woodworker by blood,

I never thought I’d see myself so clearly as I do in the stone limbs
of Daphne. On a walk in the woods, the lines blur for me between human
and tree, every bit of the world feels so leafed and barked, or as though
without Bernini’s delicate touch I might break into blossom, the difference
between rough trunk and a woman’s body becoming just a matter of perspective.

Chloris Never Wanted to Be Flora

after Botticelli’s Primavera

I.
I never asked for the west wind
to carry me away. That light breeze
stealing maple seed
helicopters from trees,
or those storms with greedy
strength, severing dogwood petals
from their pseudanthium center.

Wind god, your lusty hunger
ruined my life. I never asked to be a goddess,
queen of the eternal spring,
didn’t want to be
an eternal mother
responsible for cloning flora and fauna
again and again, on cue. Venus
and Three Graces, how could you
stand by and watch, let alone dance
upon the lichen and moss
of my sacrificed youth?

II.
Nymphdom, I still long for you.

Answering to no man
no cosmic purpose
other than my own.

But even my nymph phase
had its limitations, then I was to be
the personification of nature,
but it was so tiresome
being made up of turtle shells,
hollow logs, every bloom
and bee and murky
pond becoming some overused
metaphor for being.

Mary Ruefle said it best—
why is every poet obsessed
with being a bird?

What of the birds who want to be poets?

What of the women who don’t want to be petaled
or leafed, some object
of adoration, a flower to be picked,
vased,
entombed?

III.
I hear the tawny owl when I stare sleepless
at the ceiling for most of the night.

Stereotypes assume she should have the common
hoot, a mysterious voweled song,
a seduction,
a plea to solve her loneliness.

But her unsettling screech
is a territorial
poem
I couldn’t write
better myself.

Her talons a loaded pen
hungry to tear
this page
in two.

Eat the Sleepless Nights

I open the word document on my desktop,
a half-baked place for drafts
of broody poems, to find just one line:

I am almost in my lizard era.

Nothing else, no notes
of where I was headed with this revelation,
if I meant my blood could soon
pump backwards, run cold
as 5 a.m. dew.
Perhaps instead

I thought my skin could harden
like orange peels left too long outside,
tangerine scented petals
I once layered to shield me from the midday sun

or maybe when I typed that out
I was thinking only of the sun, myself a lizard
arched over some river rock,
open to a new era of slowing
down, of patience

of shedding what I don’t need
like the slouched skin
of the leopard gecko,

or the way he eats it:
tearing strips off his own body
in little bites

which is what I didn’t expect—

I imagined a single swallow, a final
gulp to put the past behind him,
the fruit-gobbled
peel and all, some broody nectarine 
he can savor and forget.

Perhaps I’m not a gecko at all,
but the iguana—
his thorough process of stripping
even the crust of his eyelids, eating
—as I should—
the sleepless nights

that once weighed him.

How good that must feel
removing the body’s own attempt
to contain itself.

I will think always
of Stephen Crane, how even he
had his desert phase,
the naked eating of his own heart,
savoring the bitterness.

But too many read that poem
and notice only
the action, the drama,
the acidity of tasting one’s inner
conflict, how it saturates, satisfies
the tongue.

I want to know what he did after

if he wiped the blood
from his lips before stretching
out to sunbathe, stomach full
of a former heart,
no part left of himself
he felt the need to hide.