Another Creature: Poems

Bottom of the Cup

Bottom of the Cup Get used to it, says fortune man Otis Pepper, tracing the webbing of lines in my palm and stacking his deck to reveal a magician charged with the power to transform my troubles to charms. Ain’t never going to happen, hon. That’ll be forty bucks. But you a real lady, and smart, you do just fine. This fortune inspires a double shrimp platter washed down with a Hurricane, the better to dip you in deep-fried voodoo, suck you down with sad tidings from Otis Pepper, mystic sweetheart, love doctor of no degrees. Girl, you should count your angels. Try being gay and psychic in bayou country! Happy New Year. By spring I am used to the lack of you, except to want to share this path of prairie shorn into a maze, this June day sunny and cool, fragrant with mowing. And tell you the names of flowers I pass: spiderwort, yarrow, sparks of phlox. Trill of a cardinal—no, I won’t list the birdsongs. Out back of town they’ve piled a season’s felled branches, ripe for ignition, inside a circle of boulders. The whole village comes to watch. What, after all of this time, have I ever required, 36 except requiring you? You without whom I have so long burned and sung of burning. July in high desert: hot, hot. Sad history of conquest, sad-eyed dogs. Day-glo chrysanthemums left for beloved dead in curls of highway. By now you should be the tail of the Rio Grande, a trickle too low for rafting, or a faded ristra strung on a flaking porch post. Here is the church of St. Francis, hunched like an elephant into the Ranchos square. Inside its chambers of mud and straw we genuflect and cross and strike our breasts. Outside on a path of red dirt there’s a heifer’s skull, her wormy jimson crown. And outside a Vermont window now, green mountain of moose and owl. Spare you the names of trees, the names of lakes, the shades of August; call it green. This morning I climbed a hill so steep I could feel clumps of muscles working, dividing, gathering. The sky was a twirl-a-round heaven embellished with blown-out clouds, the kind girls could carve into horses, flank and mane. Swimming the nameless lake, I knew my shoulders as my own, thought these are my shoulders my trunk, my burning branches. Out loud I said sturdy, if nothing else, I am sturdy. That doesn’t mean strong. 37 ...