Land of Sweet Waters
But the husband is an idea that occupies and tills the idea
until you are outside of it. And I wanted for so long to sing
an unlonely ode but the ode requires a centering, a centering
for which I am outside. Or I slept in the husband bed, or made
many men sing. But I come from land that meant sweet waters
and nothing of the land bears this shape. But I sipped flat vanilla
Coke medicinally and scraped the innards of a shredded warren
from the new wood finish. Or I dropped a rock on a smashed cat’s head
because it whimpered stuck living on Lincoln Boulevard. How is it
I come from Glück’s marshlands without any of its blue lore?
My body stank in its magenta stirrups, my body rattled inside
the toppling trailer home. To what origins was I supposed to speak?
My identity, it means longing, a surname slipping into ur. A stranger
told us Eilbert means olive and we were so hungry we believed him.
Mitigation
The eye
guides us,
speaks north.
In wood
a lamb
burned through.
Hunger only
a sequence
outside us.
My eyes
found eyes
and found
more blue
than I—
xx
Than I
a choking
up of
him and
I whited
to north,
a doing
violence, latitudes
shot through
the trees.
Confined here
a couch,
no room,
so uncompassed—
xx
Sewed a compass
out of boredom
to my breast,
its skin ducklinged
with some blood.
My eyes so
white and healthy,
my path, no
north, no east.
I have pasts
with no whites
in my eyes.
I lack hands.
I lack nails.
xx
I lack nails
to burrow us.
A tree blazed
in itched shape.
The man carves
his pretty verse
bark-thick scrapes.
A pitiful tree.
A rope tethered.
I came back
to screen-cut
my memories, how
he opened the
window and pulled.
xx
Widowed, a pulling, no.
It wouldn't have worked.
He halved himself up.
Folded at the sill.
He is a centaur.
Half inside, half outside.
His finger curling air.
I heard nothing once.
I hear nothing again.
Kidnapping comes from English.
To nab or seize.
I want to speak.
The windowscreen was cut.
The fingerprints still there.
xx
The fingerprints still there
but the parents gone.
Weed grows over concrete.
It’s ideal, it is.
This manner of taking.
The soil that takes
it back without blame,
the rows of violets.
No room for metaphor
without the bloodied tree.
The white part of
the eye is for
guiding us through this.
See only the eye.