Mercy Me, and: You’re Hoarding Guns, I’m Growing Herbs, and: O Come & Let Me Tell Thee How Wholly I Am Thine

Mercy Me

said the womenfolk where I was raised, and in my mindmercy was a verb, the action reflexive. Though of course   the wolf in the kingdom of winter does not mercythe elk. The owl does not mercy the harethat has trembled loose from its delicate coat of stillness.  The word has been used since the twelfth century to meanGod’s forgiveness of his creatures’ offenses.Such mercy is not what my father had in mind   when he asked me to take a pistol to livein the wilderness. I didn’t. That was nothow I imagined my days, strapping its cold weight   to my hip, a saunter to the river: Good morninglarkspur, good morning death camas and moon-flower: I am more deadly than you. Would I   slip it into the crook of the quince tree whileI crouched to weed kale? And would I, after all,shoot a bear eclipsing my doorway? Would I     shoot a man?     Back home, another gunin the safe where my bedroom dresser used to stand.Out there, the news, a loaded gun, returns   again and again to the loaded gun. Herethe old growth murmurs at night, the dark’s bonesgroan and creep. Once, barefoot in starlight   the color of gingerroot, trembling on the porchat the unknowable’s cacophony, the dog in a huff,I wondered if the fear, in the end, would get me   first. On the long, hawk-spangleddrive east, all things appeared to me as bodies: the loghaulers piled with the fallen forms of fir   coming down from the mountains, chicken trucks with their live cargoes crushed into hunchbackand the smashed daisies of feathers from which   a dim red eye looks out. Across the frostbitflatlands of Idaho, gleaming silver trucks piledwith fleshy potatoes: bodies, bodies, and on the radio  a story about a body unearthed from highin the Andes, a woman’s form arrayed with spearand ax-head, a big-game hunter. I want to summon  a blessing on this vanishing year — but I forget howthis works, what to say, in what order.I’m thinking of my good Aunt Sue who for all  those years and even after the chemo and the electro-shock therapy tucked her pale delicate chin at tableand said with quavering but without irony, We give  thanks. The moon’s between the fir’s ribs,up there in the god-dark black. The fox still movesin the roots and the rust. You could say and not lie  that this is most of what I long for in the wayof distance and the way of desire: may the fettersfall from all of us this year. May the wild light  get way down in our bones. May we, without requital,mercy one another with hands like wings,     with unarmed hands.

You’re Hoarding Guns, I’m Growing Herbs

my sister tells my father after he bends     to pluck from her patchof pennyroyal, age-old abortifacient from mint’s

family, square-stemmed, toxic, crested    like a tropical bird with morning-purpletuft, and he straightens, says, You giving away abortions now?

Later, she writes me, I think he understood.     And yet I cannot say whatunholy act, what cruel law or deed does not endeavor

to protect something. Not so very long ago,     my sister could havehanged as a witch for her wilderness gardens

of nettle and hyssop, of yarrow and calendula,     her care for forbidden bodies andsnaring of bee swarms from pine branches.

Come spring, she’ll find in the wet death-refreshed     loam spent shotgun shells plantedamong saved seed of belladonna, mugwort, blue cohosh,

Queen Anne’s lace — named, so the lore goes,     for the old queen’s contestto see who could knit a stitched bloom most like

the flower’s fractal tooth-white face, though     she pricked her finger as she purled,loosed a single drop...