Read an Excerpt
Give Me This
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.
Invasive
What’s the thin break
inescapable, a sudden thud
on the porch, a phone
vibrating with panic on the night
stand? Bury the broken thinking
in the backyard with the herbs. One
last time, I attempt to snuff out
the fig buttercup, the lesser celandine,
invasive and spreading down
the drainage ditch I call a creek
for a minor pleasure. I can
do nothing. I take the soil in
my clean fingers and to say
I weep is untrue, weep is too
musical a word. I heave
into the soil. You cannot die.
I just came to this life
again, alive in my silent way.
Last night I dreamt I could
only save one person by saying
their name and the exact
time and date. I choose you.
I am trying to kill the fig buttercup
the way I’m supposed to according
to the government website,
but right now there’s a bee on it.
Yellow on yellow, two things
radiating life. I need them both
to go on living.
Drowning Creek
Past the strip malls and the power plants,
out of the holler, past Gun Bottom Road
and Brassfield and before Red Lick Creek,
there’s a stream called Drowning Creek where
I saw the prettiest bird I’d seen all year,
the Belted Kingfisher, crested in its Aegean
blue plumage perched not on a high nag
but on a transmission wire, eyeing the creek
for crayfish, tadpoles, and minnows. We were
driving fast back home and already our minds
were pulled taut like a high black wire latched
to a utility pole. I wanted to stop, stop the car
to take a closer look at the solitary stocky water
bird with its blue crown and its blue chest
and its uncommonness. But already we were
a blur and miles beyond the flying fisher
by the time I had realized what I’d witnessed.
People were nothing to that bird, hovering over
the creek. I was nothing to that bird that wasn’t
concerned with history’s bloody battles or why
this creek was called Drowning Creek, a name
I love though it gives me shivers, because
it sounds like an order, a place where one
goes to drown. The bird doesn’t call the creek
that name. The bird doesn’t call it anything.
I’m almost certain, though I am certain
of nothing. There is a solitude in this world
I cannot pierce. I would die for it.