From “The Maybe-Bird”

4

If it were easy to leave the bodyin a breath, as smoke leaves the cupped flame,rounds itself into a crown and escapes.Today I fear both the leaving and life,the accidental step off the world’s ledge,that it might be easy, graceful to gowith my breath like the slip off a saddleof a faster breathing animal.My last awareness in the bodywas the field upside down, the world a glass bead.Suspended I was no longer myself —perhaps I was not anything but sky.I was not afraid, extending as space,and felt nothing, no panic, no elation,my breath neither flat nor curved, bottomless.What organizes back to the body?I did not choose my return, or maybeI became the horse and the horse chose, orsimply ran off its spell, shook me free.The ghosts I follow don’t follow me.

L

I am tracing from prevailing windsmy breath, neither flat nor curved. Bottomlessis my body resounding with the waveswhen there is no sea but abandoned mounds’old fields’ flood plains, indigo-dyed.Is not our world still an islandsuspended by four ropes from the sky,hovering over thick fog and chaos?To draw a coastal line in the sandas a way to understand historyis to hide behind imaginationas if it were a gilded one-eyed maskthrough which I can’t but pretend to seeleftover snow, details of fever clouds,oracles of a rainbowed mosaic.Were the earth to be born from our world —the atlas, her illegitimate author.I imagine that we never knew better.That when we reached the final waterstoo big to cross, the sun didn’t rise or fallin any direction that was familiar.

12

What lifted when I went through the gates:a rash of white marsh birds in the meadow,grassy clatter of antelope. Echo’swreckage: charcoal teeth, city’s unsheathed blade.How I envied the unborn — burned gownsgathered in shade — stems snapped, beheaded.It is nice to be dead like this from grace,the author of time’s bewildering light,her omniscient inflexible flowers.

D

In my mind’s ahistorical era,a chronology of rivers and trees.I want to lie down in the road and readthe author of time’s bewildering light.To what purpose — because I believethe underworld merely an inversionetched on a conch shell, a feathered serpentghosting in cornstalks? My field of frozen fluteshides its motif of interlocking scrolls.The moon curls into her conch shell and sleeps,her rabbit-skin shoes waiting on the stoop,the afterbirth thrown into the thicket.

L

It is nice to be dead like this from grace,glass door cracked open for a breeze,crows unrolling October’s paper curtain —a scroll across the meadow’s lunar slopesfor off-season invisible alphabets.I want to lie down in the road and readthe gold-fringed leaves of an autumn dictionyet stand between my two selves, paralyzed,accounting to do, cooking and e-mail.Must write the girls to thank them for the wine,study the dictionary of angels —what does it matter, their names are flamesand my mind hurts, all night terrorizingits survivors. Each thief of thought,a companion. The oculus watchesmy blind descent — phantom of the lakewho remembers her death, her bodyswooped off by a sharp-shinned hawk,pile of feathered bones at the door,last year’s bears asleep beneath the floorboards.