Ire, and: Forest

Ire

It’s got to be somewhere your anger andlike the moon though very far away still leavesan impression, is apt to hover    by the bedroom window a child stares throughfrom disheveled blankets. Her husk of a throat. Her dangling bewildered hair.    You know how violent that anger can get —a white streak of rat, wide as a slap, an owl’s severed cheek, fur brambled in barb,    a human forehead gashed from the brass bull slungat a wine glass. Somewhere you must    have a moon-and-anger gangtoo loud to hear, too close to feel.    Those hoodlums stuff a stealth of leather to stifle each scream.Some things shine onlywhen they’re in opposition. That anger quietas the near-dead,    near-dead as the moon with a knot for an eye, quietas a thistle hissing and bloating in a lake,    quiet and its blunt bullet-taste,metallics of pure unspared air. Nothing pure    about this atmosphere.

    Quiet shelf, book-quiet. Readers talking about the deathof quiet. You know. Doctors talking in hushed tonesabout what happens to anger when its quiet goes

Forest

O, once-child, can we find the heart in brushblack as this, too wet for a fire? Youaspired to air, child, but your bones werecumbersome. And where is the mind for ourpenny-in-the-jar? This stripped sky. Blocked eye.Scarlet Catchfly roots in sharp slipping shale.Do you have your bramble-hat, the glove madeof tiny thorns and blood? What did you say?Birds in the empty tree. No suet there.The sun’s in the west but where is our home?What is our compass without a place oforigin. There’s fever in the water —scritch-scratch of gold in the creek. A worldon the bank, one root sprawled thick as a trunk,splayed, distracted from the elm it should feed.Exposure has become its element.Child, reckon with me your lamentationof exposure, of nowhere, of red driftby the creek in this forest singed green now,crouch by the perfect lead-lidded toad,dun near his dun leaf, tiny goblet eyes,throat sac of song, perfection of stillness,alone in his element, and lonelybut safe in his skin, the skin of a leaf.    There are cliffs to study here and wood stepsspiraling through white bull-headed clouds, smudgeof rainbow near dark drifters, the violenttwist of sundown for you to consider,your hands dipped in water, fingers floatinglike loose ribs or fish. No shame in beinglost here or wordless. Here your breath is green,unbidden, and out of hiding for noone is here and you are ready to speak —.