Two more poems, and one is for my husband Bill.
And this poem I wrote in Montana when we lived in Montana.
It's called "Meditations Beside Kootenai Creek."
And I was talking with Terry on the phone this morning
and we were at Joy Harjo's craft lecture.
I don't know what you would call that,
Joy, it was just this beautiful presentation yesterday.
And Terry was saying that she loved the way
that you integrate poetry with everything in the universe,
that everything is connected in a way, the spiritual
and the mundane and everything working together
on every level.
And I think that's what us poets try to do.
I remember Galway Kinnell saying once in a craft lecture--
and it was nothing about craft, but it was all
about writing poetry.
And he said, "we spend our whole lives praying toward the one
poem we'll write."
At the time I thought, whoa.
I was young.
I thought, uh-oh.
Maybe I should go back to bartending.
But no, he was right.
He was right.
"Meditations Beside Kootenai Creek.
Sometimes I become what I least desire, old as bone,
uncomprehending as the memory of pain.
Perhaps dusk comes into a room and a woman
rattles up out of my throat.
Her eyes empty as candles set aside
for the dead, who no longer care for such light.
Her flesh gone to the birds.
It is then in gray light she tells me my skin sags.
My heart is incomplete in its beatings.
I haven't learned to love as much as the stars who
are at least not cruel.
Then as if in a dream of fire, along a foggy ridge I walk out,
hands sprouting green flames, eyes not
blind enough from blue smoke.
And I hear from its sad shadow in wet grass
the sudden up cry of a meadowlark.
And I believe I will never be alone again.
Listening to the wild applause of water as it clarifies rocks,
we step across.
We hear what we'd name Western Tanager, song sparrow, Lazuli
Bunting and over a silver patch of river, dim and cedar
shadows, the thick bilious laughter of ravens.
You say walk in cold water, let it burn your feet.
When you dive into the stream, you float for a while,
then try to hold the current in your pale hands.
And I remember your fingers like coals stoking my breasts.
Your black hair waves like tentacles or a negative halo
radiant in its aquamarine pool.
Like blind minnows, your fingertips
bump the smooth skulls of stones under water.
And for a moment, I worry you'll drown,
but you rise streaming a chandelier of watery light.
Even our dark sides love.
Last night I dreamt of blood and beatings of giving away
a bright red slip.
I tied my mother to a gypsy wagon."
Not a nice thing to do, girls, don't do that.
"I tied my mother to a gypsy wagon
and drove it west while her arms like kites
waved at passing weeds.
She blessed over and over.
She asked if the eye is as blue as beach glass.
Will it see itself leap to the bottom of the stream?
I watch a water ouzel now whose name you won't believe.
It dips in and out of sizzling foam,
its thin yellow legs canny on moss
covered stones I'd slip on.
I watch it disappear beneath white water,
consuming itself above the bird who
emerges sky gray triumphant on the opposite shore.
Ordeal by ice, twice, twice I change my heart to ice
suspend it twice in air to sprout wings
for the winds care then cage it in the bones of flame
to unlock the twins from separate names.
Even as a young girl, I'd sit beside a dry creek
I'd wish was full and sketched the Tanager shading black wings
on its heart red sides.
Sitting alone under the vast loneliness
of trees and that small woods, I heard
voices huge with wind and the coming
dusk that wouldn't let me go.
Who could I tell but the dead?
What name could I give passion?
I watched the way animals surprised the grass,
then I pretended I was a lion no one could kill.
Summer's demise, Gemini rises just
before midnight in the southern sky.
Castor and Pollux from icy toe to icy toe,
I trace with the twins eye for balance.
Even the dead must have this simple joy.
After all these years, what we come to,
wet branches beating our chests as we
wade to the other side of the creek.
Reaching for the slippery knuckles
of roots clinging to clay banks, we
fall into water we can see through.
Cedar perfumes our numb fingers that finally hold musky bark.
How deliciously we shiver?
This is the journey the heart makes back through water
under stars filled with the certainty of submarine light.
We count the times we've drowned to live.
When I climb ashore, you splash water
straight into the air at my feet.
This time I can love and shove away the dead.
You splash again.
It is that simple.
I wait for the ouzel to come back downstream, wait
for its small piping, your splashing already
deep inside me."