Words blow through her like sand in a dust storm
Stinging the tender places down to the bone
Until she feels picked bare like carrion
Clean and raw and white; bleached by the sun
In the lamplight of a southern moon
When old gods hold their court of stones
And the daytime makes no siren’s song
The great wheel begins its turning
When alters spring from every pasture
And cattle still themselves in knowing
The archer treads across the grasses
And from far behind she picks her bow
She is of the earth, all verve and grace
Called forth by trumpeting of owls
Whose voices now herald her coming
To the sleeping girls of everywhere
She bends to kiss each future woman
A huntresses mark upon their cheeks
Delivering an ancient memory
A sacred truth while sweetly, they sleep
Staring into a sepia past
Your grainy lost-life rises
From dusty drive-ways and old toys
From two bright, blond-haired hippies
One toe dipping in ceremony
As if they know of our fear:
How much marriage does it take to kill?
And in your father’s big hands
I witness the way you cup my love
And I know for the first time
Why the past gives birth to the future.
How precious your boyhood is
For that child walked you to manhood
And there, I have been waiting
For just such an afternoon with you
A kitchen table moment
The kind that makes me smile just because
You loved me enough to share
What of
The thousand liberations
If in
My very cells, I forget
struggle
And the sweetness tasted then
when life
was no promise, but a dream
In the dark-sea-thinking
Creatures once extinct, swim
Making use of the dim
Back of mind memories
The sort lit overhead
With dangerous, dangling
Beautiful and tangling
Tempters, which lure us back
So deep there’s no return
The bottom of madness
Driving, diving sadness
And then: we are consumed
She strings her bow from a quiver of hope
Launched in moonlight, that time of perfect sky
When the white flowers bloom and old trees sigh
And arrows travel with the speed of love
Her mark is moving in the quiet way
Of dreamtime bliss, of true and soundless sleep
Hardly feeling the pierce of something deep
But in the morning light, the world is new
It’s over now. He dares speak it
Thirty years and more
Past first steps and last dances
Millennium beyond
The gentle understanding of children
In the wasteland
Of adulthood blindness
Where the gods of righteousness
Take no prisoners
But make your stand, father
One day, a single siege
Nothing. In the face of
A hundred children
You never fathered
But father
Who wait
With Love
Lay before her
Your burnt offering
Of tired limbs
Of weary feet
The frail beauty
Of epic love
Which knows no rest
In the small strokes
She sees
Symmetry lift
Dis-ease
