Cold Pollen
Father built this land from the mud up
with his perfect green hands.
Now, three days on the moor,
nothing to eat and the birds have left us.
Dead crackle of weed as the ground hardens beneath
and the cold sings in our bones.
We know foxes are hiding in hollows and the fish lie
crystal-still on the lakebed dreaming.
Hunter’s shack on the horizon, a crooked tooth whistling
on a hillock. It’s rammed shut, padlocked for thaw.
What was it she said?
Something about milkweed to soothe the child that May brings
screaming. I know I should seek it out,
but again my hand returns to that which lies within
and the door flies off in butterflies of rust.
Thirty years ago we settled east, but the moor, the moor swallows
the heath as the desert swallows the moor
and the wind grows, the wind always grows.
Pillowtalk
Like the snow’s silence
that finger-sifted silence, the silence
that brushes up against your feet,
a windswept wish of muffled morning,
the sentient footprints at the door.
Like the ebullience of padded feet,
the trickling forces of godhead
and the silence pulling amongst trees,
within the stretching grasses,
the mother-glare—
the wishing for forgiveness,
the never-forgetting
in the trails and tracks and wheelruts,
the ever-narrowing, the crepuscular,
the snow crawling into bed
and the heartbeats,
the everything-you-think-you-know
rearing, rearing, rearing,
a wetness that dwells
and the tablespoons upon tablespoons,
like the snow’s silence
that finger-sifted silence,
the rake upon the garden bed
and the roses following their pink and white and red;
and you in your spectacles,
reading yet again,
a finger-sifting,
a forgetting,
a swirling,
letting go.
