Half-Wolf Blessing
May your conception come
mysteriously, so that
i don't know who to blame,
or thank. May your presence,
secret and obvious in my body,
endow it with a new assurance;
grant to me, the mother,
a life-maker's inner authority.
May you be two, to counteract
your utter aloneness.
And may you be made female
and male, encompassing
all potentialities. Your fur--
may it be black & soft, and may
your muscles quickly learn to leap
from my arms to scampering
after one another in the green field.
In innocence and joy. May you be
protected in the dream world,
when i've gone. And may you break
my heart upon the awakening.
Beginning
she held a little funeral for it
in the back yard
the back yard, which had been overgrown
since the brief rains, and now
piebald with burnt patches
but all long, and tangled
by the work of spiders, and wind
like the story-telling pelt
of a once-liberated house cat
matted & greasy on your doorstep,
with a layer of dust,
calling you forth from work in the kitchen.
in the kitchen,
where mind turns inward
from the pressure of clutter,
yesterday's dishes from the prep
of a large pot of beans that will
sustain you now for days or weeks
jostling elbows with the cutting board
of this morning's breakfast, leering
& catcalling at the clean plates
& wineglasses of two nights ago--
ill at ease in the frail safety
of the dishrack.
the cat
calls you forth
into presence, and the act
of service. the kitchen
is still cluttered, plus one fork & bowl
for cat food but you walk
through the patch of sunlight
in the east side of the house
to the rear sliding glass door & exit
onto the back patio, out
into the embrace of honeysuckle from
six yards away.
she cleared the backyard of its
overgrowth & held
a little funeral for what
had passed away.
Of Wanting
The first two lines of this piece are excerpted from Geffrey Davis's poem, "What I Mean When I Say Farmhouse".
We have our places for
loneliness-- that loaded asking of the body.
And what a strange, heavy bauble to be given
at birth and told not what to do with. Some hang
it round the neck of another: you,
you the center to which this, my itching
gravity shall pull. It has been pulled
into weaving, oral tradition, the stories of
what this or that one did with her yearning, what heights
what great distances he travelled
at devotion's behest. Vast & dust-blessed
libraries of tomes, written & unwritten, all
scrawled in someone's pain, the patient
self-prescribing, hand claw-fisting around threads found
from the air; discovery in sheer desperation.
Each stalk of wheat in a serotinal field somewhere
a tried & true method, sanctified by shaman,
magician, neuroses' emanation, pope.
Damned voices of saints. Keys told
to transmogrify our shared, yet secret pulse
of wanting.
