Every morning at the crack of dawn he shakes me awake 
though he’s old enough to turn on the TV himself.
He’s always up before 6:30. Has to be,
he informs me gravely, because otherwise he will miss Wild Kratts.

He never turns on the lights. That’s my job 
when I stumble downstairs in his wake.
In the blue TV glow he wiggles his shoulders, sings along under his breath.
Gonna go wild, wild Wild Kratts . . . 

Sometimes by the flicker of the screen I see myself, 
there and gone like a fish in water 
(usually he is all his mother, long-legged, 
narrow face, straight nose, and I’m there only in his cowlicks). 

But on TV mornings I watch myself repeated, 
soft echo of a girl who soaked up stories 
like they could save her life.

My son is in love with the story. He will curl
himself up at my side and say “Tell me again.”
And so I will. I tell him how their sleek spotted pelts
shine against the rocks, how they leap from spray to shingle
as if they cannot believe the length of their own legs, 
how they will sit and comb their long salt-rough hair, and sing.
I tell him how it is the greatest sin of all to take their skins,
to hide them, to trap a wild and wave-blessed thing. 
I tell him men that do that meet bad ends.
He will listen to this tale a dozen times, 
My bright boy, born so far from the sea,
curled like a nautilus against my side.

It’s not true that he likes plants more than people. 
It’s just that — listen,
it’s just that plants are easier. 
To grow they just need sunlight, soil, and water.
In various proportions, sure, and that takes practice,
but once you’ve got it, all plants do is grow.

A plant does not play dumb. A plant won’t ask you
where you’ve been and make it sound like knives;
a plant won’t sulk, won’t act like something’s wrong 
and then spit Nothing like a poison dart. 
A plant will not ask you to change your ways;
a plant just grows.

They grow. They twine across the window panes,
across the door. They grow, and they don’t care if you do. 
Plants just grow. They take in poison, make it clean again,
they change dead things into air and blossoms. 
All plants do is grow, and grow, and grow.

When I think of how her last year went:
how her quick body that had traveled the world became
a cargo of suffering others took turns carrying,
how her eyes dulled and her voice escaped and no one would listen,
it’s hard not to understand why she wanted what she wanted. 

She is in the wind now. There is no stone to mark her.
She is in the Blue Mosque and Haystack Rock and Red Square. 
Nobody in the world can stand above her, or carry her
anywhere she doesn’t want to go.

I found her in with the chickens when she was small.
Don’t ask how she got in there, past the dog, 
but there she was: pink-eyed, white as new milk, 
soft as kid leather. She chirped and trilled and did not hurt the hens.
Hani said it was bad luck to keep her, that she would grow
monstrous and ravenous, devour us in our beds.
But she’s never gotten bigger than a cat, eats only eggs,
sleeps by the hearth, and drinks cream from a bowl.

Once, only once, she bit a person, one
who came in from the road, and loomed and glowered
over our bread, and did not say his thanks.
She rose up like a gust of winter wind,
took off his ear and drove him out the door.
She’s earned her eggs, her corner rug, her dish of cream.
Don’t ask me where she came from. We belong to her.

Square your shoulders beneath the mantle of fur,
plant your feet, ignore the chill now seeping through the leather.
Breathe in, feel the point of the air’s blade against your throat.
The wind against your face and fingers burns and numbs in equal
measure, makes the weight of your weapon feel immense and ancient.
Something is coming. You must be prepared.

Damn it. I do this every time,
find something new I want to make
a habit, and commit,
and then I ride the surge of interest
til it sags. A week, two weeks, a month before I lose momentum.
Like those toys you wind,
the ones that start to stutter as they slow.
Well. Let’s see if I can make this one
of the half a dozen things I didn’t drop.
I don’t know yet if I can break
the cycle by completion,
if poetry can be a discipline.

1010 2 0

Nobody wants to talk about it except in terms of darkness,
deep chasms, empty places, sadness, exhaustion, long stretches of sameness,
Nobody wants to talk about it unless you can also talk about how
the medication lifted you up out of the depths and now you can function and

listen

don’t get me wrong. It did. I can, now, but
I am still not well. Well is a state of permanence and I exist
in something else entirely, something nobody talks about even when
they can bring themselves to say its

clinical depression

name:

Nobody wants to hear about the swoops and dives, how your chemistry
is a liquid ribbon, an undulant serpent, how you still have days when
you do not have it grasped behind the head, days when it turns and bites you,
days when the fury burns at nothing, or the exhaustion takes you,

Nobody wants to hear about the days you stare at your cupped palm,
the

Pill with imprint 1010 2 0 is Tan, Elliptical / Oval and has been identified as

tether you can only hope will hold.

for L.T.

I couldn’t guess how many students went before me
into that narrow place that once had been a closet.
The room had space for the piano, for a pair 
of armchairs, and for shelves of music 
looming out of reach. She would perch 
at one end, trim and spare,
white-haired and immaculate, 
sharp as a razor, very near as thin. 

Her hands across the keys (guiding me 
in phrasing I could never help but rush)
Were long and sculpted, papery with age.
She counted out in brisk staccato, tapped against my thigh,
and the beats were light, so light, their only weight
came with her voice that snapped like winter twigs. 

I could have broken her in half, even then, 
still just a child, soft in all the wrong places, 
my fingers not yet nimble, not yet long.
But when she played Rachmaninoff, or Lizst, 

Then you could see.
Her hands were iron; she,
like the instrument itself, could not be moved;
she was a shell
With wires in its heart.

At first, of course, it was awful being a tree;
nobody ever taught me how to sway gently 
or how to live without always reaching my hands 
to touch and take, to handle and hold. 

That first autumn when my leaves left me
all I could think was: this is nakedness (I could still feel shame
then, when my soft body with its hungers was not yet far behind).
I was still afraid of being cold. 

But winter, that first winter, taught me sleep
and sway, taught me to slow what was now my blood,
taught me to wait for warmth, and taught me, too,
how to bend my limbs to shelter smaller things.

I have outlived those things, and outlived, too
the witch that cursed me, and the world I knew.
But birds still come to me for warmth, and I 
have long since learned the way to be a tree.