Gravel Road Memory
Sure this home was a home taken
and now it’s a home taken again
or taken over
with blind ideals and shiny buildings—
Tell me
tell me please
has this ground saved you?
Has the crunch of your feet on gravel
(now turned to asphalt)
sent a jolt of life through your spine saying
“go on go on go on?”
Have you knelt in the grass and felt the
rhythms of the ground drawing you into
their song?
Have you stared at the oaks at night and
felt their hands reaching into your chest in
the blur of an in-between world?
You do not respect this land.
You do not know it.
You have not looked at it once but to
imagine how to conquer it.
And now I’m left bobbing in the
waves of future and you’re asking me to
smile with you but I will not—
I will hold the memory of the gravel road
in my body
and protect it there.
Song of Thanks
I was taught the words to sing to a god—
so many words—
I was taught to sing them earnestly with hands lifted
I was taught to love him—
But only now am I learning to feel my stomach rise
up and down in rhythm with the night
only now do I touch my glossy hair and say thank you
thank you
thank you force that has given me this
and thank you to this body
and thank you to the flesh that swaddles my bones—
I was taught to hate this body and this mind
so far from heaven’s reach—
I was taught to live fast so that I could die—
now I want to inch along each frame of life
now I want to taste the water she’s dripping
onto my lips—
My stomach rises and falls—
I feel my breath
I feel the holiness there
like a prayer
so human and so pure
as the night settles me into my body.
Texas Summer No. 2
Perhaps I have been unfair.
I have talked at length about
the forest full of trilliums and ferns
covered in mosses and fungi
fed by steady rains—
But what about the things that grow
in dry places?
What about the coreopses who
thrive in the burning sun
or the false dandelions who rise with the
sun each morning and are white plumes
by afternoon’s light?
What about the cacti who find their homes
among the rocks
and the spiny lizards and black and yellow
garden spiders with their lattice-centered webs—
What about the mockingbirds flitting their bands
of white and the roadrunners with their crowns?
What about the cedars and myriad oaks
the sycamores and walnut trees
who remain strong even as they see their sisters
fall beside them?
Sisters who will not be quickly subsumed into the
earth due to orange fungus eating their softened flesh
but who will remain for years like criminals left
swinging from a noose
only there is no shame there,
just the steady triumph of remaining.
I ran from this place.
Its harshness scared me.
It scares me still, a reminder
of what is to come.
But is there not something to
be gained from its strength?
