When the Witch Ball Breaks

When the ball breaks a fox
finds your best layer and the baby cries
with shining splinters you can't find.

When the ball breaks your shoes
are dusted with powdered glass.
Every step is a challenge
to the feet you have toughened all summer.

When the ball breaks
the window has broken with it.
One wall is gone.
You sleep at the neighbors'.




photograph by Ian Mackenzie
more about witch balls here

The Last Time I Saw My Sister

There were so many things I wanted
to know. What it means, exactly,
to breathe another in. How it feels
to drown. We all

Had questions for her, admonitions,
pleas. We came with salvation,
the crooked blade
our father sent. We had traversed

The shadows of slow whales
to reach her, but like all lovers,
she misunderstood.




painting: The Sea Maidens by Evelyn de Morgan

May in Coventry

after Leofric, Earl of Mercia, husband to Lady Godiva

When your armored ears know only
the clash of spear and shield, when
you are unaccustomed to the sight
of verdant fields, when success
is measured in remaining limbs and eyes,
her voice sounds far away, and you cannot
be bothered to listen.

A battlefield wager, a joke tossed away
over a fur-trimmed shoulder. You will not
hear her leave the room, best dress trailing
in a wake like a twig on the water.

But clear as day now, the clop
of your best stallion on the cobbles
of the town square. Birdsong is stilled,
the market shuttered. With one cheek
to the window you can nearly discern
the wind lifting her hair.



more about Lady Godiva here.
painting by John Collier

The Firebird Does Not Learn

She is an egg and every shadowed glance,
every silent forest destroys her.
She is newborn and the shark-tooth grit
of the earth clings to her wet eyes.
She is in flames, the jeweled fire
that everyone remembers,
and then, what she had not foreseen,
She is burned and not consumed.
Burned. She feels her feathers
knit together. Burned. It hurts her
to heal. She is still.
She dreams of the next dawn,
a darkness, a nest of ash.




The Firebird, illustration by Edmund Dulac

Ondine in Mourning

In my grief I wash the river stones;
in my youth I fell as rain.

Now, rapids; a vision.
Waist-deep in the sea,
a man with a strong earthen jug.
He will know me when I reach him;
I will be a long time coming.






illustration by Arthur Rackham

The Language of Flowers: A Collaboration in Process

Hellebore
Calumny, scandal, treatment for madness and paralysis, highly poisonous

I will love you like loving you
Will cure me. I have seen
The others cast you into fires,
Hissing your name as your legs curled
And glowed; I have heard
What you did to Alexander, who slept
Like any other man, wrapped in your arms,
Great no more.

I have seen your children ground into dust,
Tipped into bottles, pulled in droplets to clapping mouths;
I have seen eyes go black with the force of you.
And when I am yours, and yours alone,
They say your face will open, like a shield of angels’ wings
To bear me hence.



painting by Cassandra Barney

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.