Amnesiac’s Song

Not coconut’s soft tang, not silk’s sky creases:

I need something mirror-edge sharp, thick

like mango pulp, palpable as memory

to the fingers.  A day like a stitch

in my side arrives, I walk through it –

there’s no other option – placing feet

on pavement, on hardwood, on grass,

on wet sand, picking up a fallen flower.

How could I forget the leaf-paste

of fall? Now a foreign pressure, heavy

with water and color; I don’t know

what it takes to be fluid, an apple core

dissolving into worm-soil, crumbling earth:

too much like clotted sea-foam to leave a mark

on hands’ memory.  I walk through

the stitch, a seamstress drowning.

Memory’s creases, thick as yarn stitching, part

the grass under my feet, pound the flowers

into heavy paste – I don’t want to know the core

of this marked earth, drowned fingers pushing through.

Notes on Coulter Pines

Dear house on a slab of granite:

What day is it?  What day were you born?

What rhythms do you endure from the rock

beneath you, the mountain ridge pasted

across the sky?

What do you make of lace pinned to your windows?

What is it to stand straight on a south-facing slope –

What are your thoughts on driftwood –

*

Coulter Pines stare through the glass doors,

The best kind of audience – alert.

Widowmakers, watch me.

*

If I close my eyes the silence of a town

fills my vision.

I never knew sound as a kind of armor.

*

Easy to pretend the pines are sentinels

who growl away the morning

keeping time between first phone call, third glass of water

keep time, hold it, stomach tensed

like fingers that won’t let go

that first night

I couldn’t stop staring

Some kind of optical illusion, every minute the trees

a little further away