Weather
Afternoon and cloth dolls.
Evergreen cloves,
waiting the color of tea.
In the scratched sky, rain
hangs like a mouth.
My forehead is pale and taut. I enclose
you each Saturday morning
as you drive from your Savannah wife
and enter my block
like smoke.
Like baking.
When you sleep I've opened
your mouth so slowly
and looked all the way into you.
I saw thirteen tiny orchestra members
tapping violin bows against their knees,
humming, glancing around.
I shut your mouth and kissed you
as deep as the sorrow that does not speak.
This house in pieces of sage and bark.
Shorter Days
If you knock
I will not be home. I will be a bell
of blue, tossed into the gray sweater of the sky.
Yesterday your moccasin next to my red apple, children
caroling and pleading
against my palms of white, my milk
as always swollen in my breasts. Night and fingernails
and the day of cotton, thick with boredom. I was meant
for a chariot of clandestine gold. I was meant
to halter, to spill.
In advent, Mary is a girl asking God to scatter her imagination. She wants
the chaos beyond grip, red and purple staining her brown hair, and through
her hair, into the field and the sky in which she stands, waiting
to wasp. Vessel. A landing
place, clean for pigeons. My eye is a rock, catching copper, the metallic lick of heaven.