The Many Woods of Grief: Poems

The Last Arctic

6 The LasT arcTic 1 My mother calls me Luna Moth. She says I will dust the far-end perches. When I lie in bed with the lights off she brushes my teeth & they are hers. In the silencing wind of the poplar farm she contorts her mouth into pale geographic compositions. Weathervane, deep well, static gestures, a time quarry whose spoils replace my molars, we are of God’s netted inhale. My father sighs, standing on the porch, arms folded to his chest. One cuticle of moonlight constricts, scrapes across his lip, audible, not like a father moth but aching spoken swollen in the earth. But when I flap my wings, encircle her, rub my sweet gum against her wrist, she tastes like dark night. Like warm patient stars. 2 I sleep in the pit now. He has taken me away from her. I dream of her breath polishing a green apple like an off-air weather channel. There are others now. They stand like scarecrows, 7 hind wings unfurling into jagged breeze puzzles. They let their eyes dry. Watch the blur bend & become my astronomy. I crease & soil garments though I’m naked. In the dark they hear me gnaw the trough until my jaw unleashes the cold night air. Sometimes I talk to roots & the roots keep the sound in the sky from pouring down. 3 I think we make the scarecrows insecure. I am hurting myself. I arch my back against the slope of terrain & without ribs I think. It isn’t wet now. Green heat echoes up & down these fields at night, drizzling meal in the hedges, the molars & jaw click. The stars in their sky-well swivel in pulse. Like boiling, breaching beets. ...