Poems

The Carolina wren – posed

pert on the branch, alert

tilted, tufted rump exposed – 

makes a fine feathered mannequin.

Blink again.

Each hollow bone beneath

the skin echoes when the beak

unclasps – born in the ribs,

a ceremony of song unwinds

a brilliant ribbon in the wind.

I

Loose, I wear three keys on a chain, stems

that clatter as I walk the grounds. I scare up 

small brown birds. The metallic rattle I make 

is thick with the heft of doors hewn from heavy wood. 

What woman hasn’t practiced being kept, sister? 

We learned young to listen at the cracks, to press 

an ear against the gilded vent.

II

Hackberry leaves fallen and dried

form narrow arrowheads – brittle missives

that evade the rake’s teeth. I put my shoulder

to the task and absorb the joint’s ache. Tell me,

is there a piece of this stronghold you find lacking? 

Press your cold fingers over the blisters 

I’ve raised. Let me feel the weight.

The preserve was on fire. Fire all over the field. 

I saw what I saw and my mind made sense of things.

I probably had gotten an email, a newsletter with this news. 

I kept walking. I had driven there to walk, after all. 

The ash formed where grass burned but fell, too.  

The ash was like a dream of snow drawn by the wind. 

The purpose of the preserve is to show a before-shot: 

a prairie reduced to remnants, a room five-acres across

where grass and decay and ash matter. The fire is a part 

of this. The prairie is kept safe but kept, and so needs to be lit. 

On fire, the field begets another metaphor, an after-image.

What we did, do. I had driven there, after all, just to walk.  

A few weeks later, snow fell on the field, which remembered the fires. 

The snow put out nothing, but for a moment, looked rather believable.

On my bike in Arkansas

A state I am new to

Reminding myself 

I am a person with a body

In the heat

It was there in me

More willing to grow 

Than I was there in it 

A dead oak leans too far over in the distance

I see people everywhere

I talk on the phone sometimes

The spiderwort comes up 

To my knees

Their leaves open like wings

Peter once told me about just noticeable difference, a phenomenon 

where we can calculate that enough has changed for a subject to notice

a change has occurred, volume or hue or how today, it’s gotten so cold 

even Russell wanted right back inside after his business. Sandy said

to drip the faucet so I drip the faucet and it sounds louder the longer it goes. 

The sound I listen to, so close to what Nave described, why she has to 

replace the pads on her flute: you hear a hesitation, fingers tense to try 

to speak a note that will but won’t come on cue. Imperfect music 

is still music if it happens at the moment the sound notices the music 

it’s making. Words become poems. I thought being a poet meant I had to 

know the difference. At some point I became someone who thought 

differently. I hadn’t noticed I had changed. I must have been looking in 

some other direction when it happened. As children, we used to say

I almost saw it, when we didn’t see the deer my grandfather told us

were in the woods beside the road. Deer, woods, words, poems. 

I don’t need to tell you the difference, just to tell you it’s happening.