Two Poems

GREEN IN DROUGHT

1.

green the color of unpolished silverware, green the edge

around a bruise, green the longing of missing a place, green placed

between two thumbs to make the grass blade

whistle, green plucked

out of the teeth, dill green, cabbage green, green of worry on the cusp of breath—green, did you breathe?

green yellow, green blue, green sleep

trees hold in winter, green dreams I prune with sterilized clippers when stepping outside in an effort of waking

to waxy green of scrub oak suckling on fog, green against gray backdrop with

wisps gone falsely vibrant through green sunglasses, green bottle left after drinking

on a table in the moonlight, green echo

of an evening remembered at dawn, green the dank cellar, onions in the cold sprouting tiny green tips, green kiss

scallions leave on the lips, flavor enhancer, the foliage

taking over from beauty after blossoms have passed, green recollected in rain the color of saturated

cement, gray green, the coo

of doves outside the window, once green, the view

2.

in California in an ’80s summer as long as

the industry of ants collecting aphids I stood

in our dank cellar with its smell of onions where I was supposed to be a girl

looking for the clippers, but the grassy scent wrapped me in some kind of shawl

not heavy though my shoulders felt how it flowed wide as ten thousand animal breaths and thick as the touch receptors

on a mole’s padded snout used to tunnel into the earth

and I remember even now this classroom of damp

teaching me a different form

of measure, units for how matter pools and fluxes

into what we tend

to label landscape, an undulation, a comforting bed, a yard where my mother was calling

for me to come back from that envelopment, but my name—once four letters—had stretched

into some other type

of word, written in a script as permanent

as chlorophyll

3.

what if the will to stand in the fray, to inhabit the frayages, as Spivak calls them, where limits and tensions reside, is a crying out

for release as gentle as lacy veins on a dried out leaf giving way and only then as the shape disintegrates

know how it was all connected

what if strength means to lose

one’s boundaries a bit, out in public, under fluorescent lights in the conglomerated

mega store where the plants are dying for lack of care and the emerald saturation of a frond holding on—this green could be so luscious—catches you in the grip

of twig, branch, trunk, hand

to the bark, thumb dusting the delicate

veins of

this one thought

unsightly, ragged, rough

at the edges, not worth the price, though you passively scan your card to pay, though your house has no more space, though your human children tease you for adopting

yet another plant, what if

4.

I was born into parched banks and lush loneliness,

cypress canker, glacier melt, the hand that is

gripping the tool in the gray slip of day through which the sunlight glides, this mouth that is not

capable of forcing words to say exactly what it is to be aware, whether standing here on sandy soil is anything more than an accident

of thirst and youth, and the failure of prophets to stop catastrophes from happening or

my own failure to recall the reality of color—green shimmer of twisting fish—and texture—chipped lip of paint on metal—to make a choice

from among the details, save what it is

coming through the senses uninvited,

what it is I’m doing in the middle of the uncreated

country that’s always been here, inside of me, land as companion

I’ve been living with for all these years, the forgotten self made visible

or the forgotten selves, string of green, this green in drought taking

me so far east, it becomes west, and down is up

in a vibrancy born in me extending into the space

of others, breathing

nearby, since after all, we are each some

of the other of the plum of the juice of the dribble of the sourness of

skin that holds in sweetness, that rich distillation of the sky

we can bite right into, taste the sleeping

clouds, thunderstorm nestled in the whole bed

of pulp, flesh, our tongues asking

more of each other, for more, for

a torrent

***

CONDUIT

1.

I don’t know why the ocean pays out its pearly rubble

on this specific beach, hundreds and hundreds of sand dollars below our feet, repeating their breakage

like an endless string of calculations

working down to the answer

of sand

the contrast of black rock against surf, the multiplication of gull shit layered on the crags, a blue blanket draped across the shoulders

of two who remain, turning their love

against the wind so it won’t get chapped, so that in summation it seems

the pearls of dead sand dollars strung along the shore are the most likely thing to treasure

before the tide takes them back from the dunes roped off from us humans

to let the snowy plovers mate

I watch my daughters run from dot to dot, packing their pockets, collecting chipped disks

we’ll wash off, later, in the bathroom sink and leave to dry on a rag overnight, not realizing

by morning the carcasses will be swarming with ants eating away at the remnants of flesh that still clings

to the surface

2.

under the circumstances and since I once lived there and because she is a mother, too, doesn’t the woman in Texas deserve

deliberation, why she might want to take certain books off the shelves of the library,

ban unsettling

passages that make desire explicit, set a flame

to paper and ignite a burning

sensation inside the body the mother pretends not to notice, grooming

her own image as she stands outside

the library’s front window, licking a finger to tame the fly-aways made evident in open air, illumined by big Texas sky and I

catch the scent of polyvinyl hairspray

and exhaust

see the river oak beyond, how it stands quiet and gorgeously twisted and not frostbitten or interrupted or struggling to recover yet

before the mother pushes through the door to join what I imagine

is a circle of red plastic chairs arranged for all the keepers

of the faith, but on reflection, I have more faith in the oaks I have always loved, I have always loved

their dark arteries

undulating from the base as if trying to debate the ocean

or carry on a dialog with something remote and so vast and far away

the trees have to fling themselves at it in order to catch what’s invisible with their moss covered arms

not seeming at all bothered by erosion

or the spores of ferns bedding down in the roughness of bark, by its very nature layered

so when I lay down in its shade as a girl and splayed my arms and legs as wide as they could go

I felt right and much sturdier than in public

throughout the day with the gaze

of all the men looking at me

3.

do you as well throughout the day keep thinking of the ocean and the waves, of the oaks and the way

our lies are pressurized

like aerosol spray, dispersed into the air

we breathe into our bodies and

4.

for all my walking through the dunes, what do I really know about untruths or unsettling or what is due to whom, though I used

to live in Texas in a duplex where two highways intersected, where the Texians used

to live with their German, Dutch, and Swedish accents, where the Mexicans used

to live, deeming foreigners pirates and dealing with them as such, where the Spanish used

to live in what they dubbed an interior province, where the French used

to live, having misjudged where the Mississippi meets the sea, where the Karankawa used

to live, waterproofing their baskets with viscous bitumen, where the Atakalpa used

to live, though they called themselves the Ishak and went following the buffalo, where the Petaros used

to live in the Pineywoods of eastern Texas, which is all we know, we know

more about the woods we are trying to save than the people who once lived there

and when you hike all the way to the end of the trail

your only hope of gaining any sense of scope over the wetland

is to climb the lookout tower and see

how pathways forget they are paths

and grasses blur into the grass

and yucca fans out like eyelashes

opening from this vantage point to reveal the shapes the eye was hiding—all the alligators

you had no idea were submerged just a few feet away as you passed

on your journey to get here

5.

under the circumstances and after her journey and because she speaks her second language now more beautifully than anyone born here, doesn’t my friend deserve

awe at the way she wraps her English

sentences so effortlessly around the shoulders of the person across

the table when she teaches her class on “Restless Women” to the inmates at the prison once a week

though of course they don’t hug or clasp hands or do any of that stuff

with their bodies on account

of the no-touch policy, so many of them become real talkers instead

that’s what my friend says, though I’ve never

been a talker, and I’m still learning how to take a circuitous route with the hope that you’ll follow, not get lost or wander off when I describe how

when my friend and I were walking along the bluff hunched into the gusts and somewhere in the twist of conversation her admission slid in, you know

I have a lot of darkness in me

it felt soft, like velvet or the fur or the underside of a still living

sand dollar, all the purple cilia waving in unison to move a microbe slowly toward the mouth

to catch it

and her admitting it weighed the weight of something small and so obvious but forbidden, the closed off

hole we all hold in the center of our stomachs, black opal

echoing the universe inside it

some famous male poet I barely knew once tried to steal from me, reaching out at a crowded reception

to pat my stomach, caress it, history

a set of pre-existing conditions, so when my friend said, I have a lot of darkness in me

her words became a conduit, a being

connected by the needles

of wind knitting the fibers of our untied hair and

6.

I still know very little about speaking

language, which is public, other than it grows by loans and borrowings

from other families and is a whole mess of tangle and conquest linguists map, trying to represent it neatly as an oak tree and

I still know very little about ghost woodlands, saltwater intruding on the roots

stumps and stumps passing to grassland turning to marsh flooding to sea, and certainly

I know nothing of massacres, the Ishak splitting in two and then disappearing

so what’s written of them is written from the perspective

of an enemy settler, and I’ve never met a girl who’s sure

of who she is in a world that wants to fondle her, which means I need my girls to read her story, find it at the library before the shelf breaks under the endless

weight of all the badly written picture books about pretty mermaids

my daughters love, my daughters love, which means they replicate out of sand

whatever they’ve been given and they’re building now the mermaid’s tail and they’re dragging strands of kelp for hair washed up from the dying

forests under the sea, these twisted mounds of weeds buzzing with flies

the girls don’t seem to mind, though I’m exhausted

by the rush of highway traffic that never stops

hushing us from outside our house, and tonight I’ll tell them yet again at bedtime to pretend

it’s just the ocean, and the ocean is not rising, and they’re simply lying on the beach

with the waves, the waves, the waves…