work in progress

(poem notes toward a soft hand of your animal kingdom - work in progress)

Here in the soft hand of your animal kingdom,
the crouched low flowers are holding themselves tightly,
tightly blue and dark children all.

This is your bit and you can bite it, the dry earth
and sky and chestnut seedlings. There are elements
of drought, bagged and shoved against the sun.

Here in this soft whirl, the lines fuzz as spring enters into
dim words with summer. Birds re-nest. Ants set up.
Bees depart and return heavy with their own labours.
You can pour rainwater into their shadows,
for the comfort of ghosts and red threaded beads.

This is your bite of it, wormed and brittle as later can be.
There's a saggy hole where the birds all dive deep.
There's a circle of daisies where nothing will creep.
There's a path to the tree with a wire heart.

Here in the soft hand of your spirit,
the leaning tower of everything breathes out,
free now, just for now.

They Try

*

They try, they try.
Early on, placing pale pink buttons along a path.
She might think they are sweet and kind, they whisper.

They try, as might.
Early still, watching from the hedgerow, counting time.
She hesitates, pulls hoops of light around her face.

They try, as always.
A little while, eating berries that stain their dresses.
She watches, wipes dry fingers through blank stares.

They want, as something.
Perhaps now, turning, prancing, making noises.
She glances, borrows a stitch from the hem of sun's coat.

They need, not her though.
Until another time, forgetting, regretting.
She sits and wonders, why did I start?

The Faery Story Writer

1.


I finger the meat of their names silently. Without looking in the book, knowing the Latin and also the folklorish. Pushing myself back to where things just appeared, the rub of a flower would be a whole day.

Lately, reading yellowed petals and Elizabethan blackness. This little world ticks with museum analysis. And the rain keeps us busy of course, the buckets of it. Look out to find the flowers as individual mothers. I mislead devices, puncture the watercolours. Let the mouths grow. Sew, if it pleases you. I am just a character waiting in an email, a flora, a glow of yellow, a stray hair on a lens. Bending in the rain, hit by birds eggs. Just now thinking nothing much without you, except perhaps a paisley scarf, a teaspoon, a tarnished photograph. Except perhaps a story will bloom once the clouds transcend.

All along the windowsills in this house little displays of debris and mishaps, half-mades. Papery worries and things hanging in jars. All the while a latter moment, walking above carpet. The silly stages of recovery, talking too quickly. Boxes beneath and dresses hanging from curtain rails. Waiting to be asked, due to bright hardness, due to the build-up of flowering wild rain.

My job is to write stories that fit us in somehow. That make a child sing again. Make the mother weep. Some might be wrong, terribly, full of fairy snacks. I might write nothing of everything for pages. Climbing trees, people like it. They do not want to know the really dim staring out of windows. Characters that toil because they love. I write mistakes that come good and surface breathing pleasurably. If a magazine comes today and takes my photo standing near a desk with typewriter and papers, they will make me wear red lipstick, I will make them tea and cakes.

Singing, lying on their backs, my stories are waiting in the rain. The dolls on the windowsill are watching them with wide stitched eyes.