Poems as Maps II

Words can be cartographic, carrying with them imprints of places lived, visited, and imagined.

Last night, the big chestnut across the street was split in half, either by light / -ning or wind, I can’t tell which. I’m only mortal. I slept / as the elements took their toll

Paradise vs. paradise for / us here. I was the wickedest daughter / of the wickedest generation of the wic / kedest empire the world had seen.

Meltwater uncovered ancient riverbeds / Streams broke the icy air like relieved old women: / fingers bruised, ready for death / just like that old bear husband

A river so slow, you can practically step in the same spot twice. / Its will is faint— / having been shackled / and placed elsewhere, again and again.

To step into it, time being / funnily sequenced or accruing / laterally: a botanic tyranny / is moss, is how listening / dithers at the drum and I / follow it out to the fence.

I am 46 years old. What / could that possibly mean? / I sit in a 107-year-old house / listening to a 70-year-old tree / drop one green-frilled acorn / after another

The sun passed the block before dinner was ready, but we put on jackets and ate on the stoop anyway. A blanket, place settings, cloth napkins on the concrete

There weren’t / as many people, guns, or human nuts back then. Not as many / flags or fanatics.

The dust in me calling to the dust they be- / Come, so now when I hike the dry hillocks / Opening the green, green-yellow, yellow-brown / Doors of the grass creaking beneath my feet, / I enter

dew droplets caught among the chain link / fence diamonds sink into themselves / there is so much earth around us / we barely register

What is universal now but a hierarchy? In that it still develops too much consensus around its power. How do we take up space in place?

that sweet little piece of as / is land / that poor little patch shaved / off the banks that is / a weeping in the wind