Will Bloom in Our Lacuna
I’m sorry I can’t give you and ours
a child, sorry the barrenness rests in my chest and not
my womb, sorry I’ve turned the earth
beneath our tree blank like a black walnut, that everyone
you loved who made us will die again
with me.
But my own mother taught me not to gild the lily,
every empty space a part of the design. After
the driver broke my father’s skull, the shards lacerating
his brain, we burned him up, left him
behind glass, and I hid in the print studio, spent
hours on lockups, sticky rubber ink and metal type biting
the cotton surface. She taught me, too, sometimes the best
creations start with a mistake, so in smudging ruin
I dragged a palette knife in one fluid arc, let it streak
into absence.
Outside, the rows of eucalyptus, their skin pale
and splotchy, dropped leaves and pods and branches—
widowmakers, she said, and she would know—sent
messages through the soil, thwarting other plants
in wide rings and still, what long and glinting life teemed below.
***
Single-Action
What makes a woods, what lives there.
How long skirting the edge becomes you,
a part of its ecology. The proprietors
refused you twice, until sober enough
to buy the .357, you walked
into the nearest wilderness, ever
present in that Country, fired
a sinister test shot to make sure
it worked, that if you got the nerve
you would not
just maim yourself, could fully
shapeshift and wheel where the light
splits the canopy, tell us:
is consciousness a substance
that stops among the looming
black spruce or always a root of some
tussock tundra not yet dreaming of itself.
