~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Barn Name

The colt's registration papers name him Sensational Revival,
as if those two words could define a bumbling equine soul
who outraces his own shadow with his ears pinned in seriousness,
flying in maddening circles around the worried donkey.
The transfer has been filed; I am listed as owner.
But what to call him, his barn name, the common one?
You're really going to ride that someday?
my husband asks as we watch the colt leap
straight into the air and strike hawks with his hooves.
He's a black Pegasus with wings the color of the clear
summer sky; you can't see them beating, but you can feel the wind.
I've learned not to name horses anything too noble,
something they can't live up to.
To think of the names I picked when I was a child—
Shadow Strider, Fire Dancer, Pomegranate—
for the kind and tired beasts that held me as safe
as if they had been sofas.
Finally I name him Rocket
because of the way he launches toward heaven
with no way to get back down
except by burning up in the atmosphere.
He is a miraculous and willful machine.
Such a name is close enough. Not perfect.
It is better than calling him only the colt.
There's no more human task than this naming
of things to claim them,
and it is one that is never finished.
Think of it— the first job we were given
was to label what we found in a garden.
And still, we are deciding whether to call
this ground we leave behind us paradise.

Imago

I have read that, to form wings,
caterpillars must digest parts of themselves

in the closet of their darkness.

I have lived so many lives
even I have lost track of them.

I have moved from girlhood
to womanhood like a trout

surfacing in the light, a flicker of mouth,
then disappearing again into a shadowed bed.

I have been married and divorced
and remarried.

I have prayed and blasphemed in equal measure
to see which one worked.

I have read books and written them;
some of both, I have abandoned.

I have spoken and then taken the words
back into my teeth and swallowed them.

Even as our bodies unspool
from their frames,

we are always only becoming.
Have you seen the shining threads of spiders

streaming from the tops of fences
on mornings the young have cast off into the wind?

I don't remember home well enough
to get back, so this place turns into it.

It is summer. The cabbage worms
have broken through their skin to inhabit the sky.

That's the kind of revision we long for,
the kind that some would call heaven.

Paradise

On the eighth day, we decided
how to contain our happiness.
That it could fit in the shape of masonry veneer,
repurposed furniture, used cars with peeling clearcoats,
a kitchen of organic vegetables.
That we could set it all safely in an unkempt yard
of rosebush, dirt, and sky.

Here we are, then. Taming our land.
Teaching it our will and our caprices.

Look: in the window, an orb weaver
gathers raindrops from her body
with legs that move like a bow across a violin;
she lifts the round jewels of water and drinks.
Though the wind tears her golden thread again and again,
she writes a masterpiece.
Her art is wonderful, so we let her live.

But there is no season of easy survival.
In the summer months this house
is beset by drought and lightning.
Fireflies flash like blessings from the forsythia
and disappear as if they were never there.
Cacti grow rich purple fruit, covered in spines
that make us draw back. The earth is hard.

Then, the winter, which wraps our walls in stillness, comes.
And we mourn. All the trees have been opened.
You can see their secrets on clear cold afternoons,
abandoned nests, broken branches, wounds like ours.

As long as this house stands, perhaps
I can't be banished from our world.
I beg you, say this place is mine. That I own it,
however much I can't belong to it.

Or maybe I belong to nothing.
They tell me my mother was a mountain pine,
roots thrust deep between gray boulders.
My father—so I hear (I never knew him)—
was moonlight on a river.