Trainyard

I have to ride my bicycle places to write.
I can fill my brain all I want
with images of boxcars
but I cannot see the boxcars—
I cannot touch their corrugated frames.

I have to take my body to the places
that my mind goes
in order to pluck details from them
like butterflies from the air.

Sitting, still as I am,
I can pick out their black wings
and trace the constellation of white dots
like points on a map.

The butterflies of my memory sound
like the clear sky
and like weathered
wood—they shuffle out the song of how
everything that is outdoors
has touched the real air.

Riding the rails
I zoom past the ramshackles
on my tennis-shoed feet
as much weight in me as a butterfly
as much contained space as a boxcar.

And the yellow light
which sighs through the train yard like a whispering ribbon
unspools across my back
as I mount my bicycle and ride back home,
head full of things to stick
pins through—black
on a blank, white page.

the capacity for infinite patience

i have the capacity for infinite patience. i'll exercise it.

the fact that we cry

the fact that we cry is proof enough for me that our bodies are full of magic

the sleeping place

[knees pressed into the sandy soil of this fragrant field,
a drop of human musk in the expanse
of clover mustard & winter wheat.]

This tiny world/
(eight outdoor cats and a fraying, desiccated mouse skeleton on the front steps)
is linked to billions of other crystalline places/
(a devoured spider's skeleton still hanging from a blade
of grass, spinarets left miraculously intact and hollowed body open
to reveal eight tunnels to tiny legs)

is linked by the sinewy black wires of telephone poles.

Hopi gods mapped geometric and towering across the blue &
white(gold) back of the palomino sky, the spectral ghosts of the power lines
cradle the buckskin world in their outstretched limbs--

they are the wardens of this abandoned country,and their fierceness preserves
the wildly inhabited empty spaces where Nature steals
in like water downhill
and is sucked up by the life that uncurls here,
rosy-cheeked and vibrating/

(red ants crawling
up my sleeping legs)

exalting in the berth we give to our creations
and the taboo of change.


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