Devil’s Lake

She said: “Today I will disobey god in very strange ways.”

“Why?” he said.

“The March strawberries in the valley are as big as spiders.”

“So you are a shattering, or shattered, thing?”

“Neither.”

“So you walk backwards to blend with the dead?”

“Not exactly.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I walk backwards. I blend with the living.”

*

Lord, this is your world, where the living

say things like: “My parents met

in a bathroom.”

The stars chase one another:

Horse the Scorpion, Queen the Boy.

We make plans, hold out palms

to shining bathroom sinks.

No matter what

we will always be ten.

Salt in earth and sea, salt

the small diamonds in each crater

of tongue. Suppose

the next realm were a pile of salt—

no glory-glory, no windstorm—

what then? We will walk or not

beneath the yellow sound

of trees. Their shattering.

*

In the small hours, the little ones that accumulate and scalp off

like skin, we spoke of suffering, hung clothes to dry,

whipped mayonnaise into tuna.

I assure you none of it could have been different.

This is a window, we said, this is glass.

This is lightning in our throats and we must be careful.

A neighbor child ran about in the yard, naked

as knee-bone, dirt on his neck, a happy animal.

This is a table. It is where the bread goes.

*

At eleven on Uncle Bob’s farm we found a bat

behind the barn, dying, a small black fig with wings.

I remember picking up rocks the size of my fist

and I remember the act of throwing. I knew

so well what then to do with the dying.

*

If I wanted to be anything

I wanted to be the place

where a river used to be.

Call it legacy, call it diminished return.

Every night I fold and unfold

like a pair of hands in prayer. Even if

they are burning. Especially if.

*

I will tell you three lies:

If one person says no everyone else

will say yes, knives in each hand.

On the third Tuesday of each month

a man or woman arrives at your door

very late in the night with droopy flowers

and just stands there.

If you are satisfied you are not doing it right.

*

The year we learned the word for coffin

everything became so fatally wounded,

then slim-salvaged, then worn.

The black widows looked out

onto the black lawn.

*

I can never tell what the mantis is thinking.

The dog is another story: food, pleasure, play—easy.

The mantis sits still for hours

in her most basic shape, existing

without complication like a picture

of a tree. That small thing clasped in her fingers

is the baby pheasant that left my body

seven years ago that inordinately difficult day.

It will come to life again. Tomorrow

I will open my blinds and see it forming

on the bare fingers of a weather-bent tree,

the rarest of blues.

*

Run away now child

the silver bell in the tower

no longer rings.

There is a darkness in

the neighborhood

best to leave it be

best to come back

some other time.

*

Only I never came back.

Tonight I consider how unremembered

it all becomes, how different we will look

when we inhabit the bodies

of birds. Such sad music,

this coat in emptier rooms.

Two fingers in the palm of a hand.

*

This was the first free gesture:

just before midnight, in the impractical garden,

a man walks out to find a woman bent near

a pond, brushing water through her hair

with both hands. She of course is the first

to do this and he is the first to see this.

When she looks up, sees him nakedly there,

she is startled. There is no verb yet

for the way their bodies move.

There is the night, this water, her luminous hair,

his naked legs, all of which they will name,

all of which they can never give back.