Private Readings, Fortunes Told

You will take a strange journey.
In the night you will mistake crumpled Pepsi cans
for the eyes of deer. You will
apply the brakes. Around this sharp curve
a blinding truck with a plow, a sudden shock
of fog, and then the sweet black certainty
that nobody is looking for you.
You will size up each ditch in passing,
too much mud in this one,
that one too shallow. Your car will creak
and chuff against the dull grade
of the hill.

One wet mailbox
will become another, until like thawing fingers
you will rejoin the living, pull up
to the house. "He's here," you'll hear
your youngest sister say. "We thought
that you were lost."


photograh by Connor Tomas O'Brien

Roanoke Island, 1590

after John White

Virginia dear, I would be,
I am, lost
without you.
In the dark heart of the forest I listen
for laughter, footsteps, hoofbeats, all
like pattering rain but no leaf stirs.

I turned with the full breath of God
in my sails, and becalmed in the glitter
of gunpowder and silk perfume.
Your tiny hands, scrubbed with dirt and dried
with twigs, vanished from me
with my promises.

Only the tree bark will answer me now,
in a papery tongue with no words.
The shadows expand to swallow me.
Every last man has gone, but it is you alone
who has left me.

Deirdre Departing

Darling, I told you already:
Don’t think of me leaving,
Don’t think of me going. Think,
Dear heart, of the staggering size of the world, the
Doors I have never even seen.

Today dawned bright blue and he appeared, a
Daedalus to take me to the sun. There was no
Decision, no breath of doubt. We are
Dizzy in the sky the night left behind;
Our hearts dart toward it, dancing, darling—

Don’t think of me leaving.


Deirdre Departing With Her Deer by Cassandra Barney, created for "D" of The Alphabet Show

Small Sides

1.
Not silver needle, not jumping black blood,
not small white spot of fire inside her elbow, but something,
something made her crumple every time.

2.
They had leapt in front of her car for years,
waiting in the night to surprise her with their deaths.
She kept us from watching Bambi,
said it would give us the wrong ideas.

3.
Ten years of mornings, battered shoelaces through the
same number of eyelets in the sneakers, same distance
from black canvas ankle to red star to rubber heel.

4.
She sat in the half-dark, waiting, hearing the popcorn
around her. Only when the last lights dimmed
would she joyously allow her hand to dip
into the red-striped paper bag.

5.
The oral surgeon sat back, his eyebrows
perfect tildes. "Your teeth are fine," he said.
"Just two years too young."

6.
The bunsen burners had given them an idea.
They walked to my seat at the lab bench, brandishing
yards of rubber tubing. "Witch."
I could hardly believe
the word I was hearing. "Make sure you
clean up after," said the chemistry teacher.

7.
She opened the pink plastic box,
saw erasers shaped like citrus-colored stars.
She held one up to the light, knew it was stupid,
and put it in her mouth.




tagged by P of what possessed me. P, please remind me to never attempt this again.

untitled

The shadows of the deer flew
across the Post Road
just beyond the reach of my headlights,
hunched like fugitives.
There is a darkness, they told me
as they wandered into the trailer park,
that you cannot control, a drumbeat
you can neither silence
nor ignore.

December 2

She woke in the silence, knowing the sound of snow.
Outside the kitchen window a stag, new antlers,
stood on hind legs to reach the frozen berries of the tree near the road.
She washed the coffee pot, her eyes locked on his hooves,
the trail of tiny prints he left on the lawn.

Her heard her watching and turned from the tree,
caught her dead in the eye through the glass and the snow.