I started writing poems very close to what I actually knew.
Though I say, I make everything up.
I live alone, I have no children.
I have no parents.
I just appeared one day.
And then that seal, that circle began by itself,
almost to get wider.
There are more people in it that I could love I guess.
And my heart got bigger.
And so I like to go from that point to this one.
This is written from a photograph by Susan Meiselas,
from the book El Salvador.
I'll read this and one more.
This is called The Species.
Early morning, the sea dark blue and violently marked.
On the fresh cut lawn, in the sour stacks of unraked grass,
a bird I do not know.
I get out the book, and look back and forth to it.
To its little scored body, marsh sparrow, seaside sparrow,
sharp-tailed sparrow it seems and it's a lark sparrow.
The dark wonder of a new species touching my life.
The way the man lay there, stiff and dignified
on the gritty soil.
Somehow she looked [? lovey ?].
Being with my father at his death,
opened the knowledge of a new species, the corpses.
She made it stiff as if tied to a chair,
her elbows bent and her knees bent and there was no chair.
You could not untie her.
Skin dusted all over with sand, with its tiny bowls
of hard light.
They set her aside, while they dug up the other nuns who
had been raped, killed, buried.
She lay on the edge of the bank, fragile and rigid,
a different order of being the species always turns into.
And she looked like a leader of her kind.
Arms akimbo, and legs cocked like some dreadful angel flying
in place at the surface of the ground.
Something in her brow, and cheeks and open mouth
gave her that look of power, of a God
who could turn darkness to light, as if she would not
turn it back on men.
The deep internal tearing of her sex.
They're seeding it now, stopped and hard.
The sand in it, the dirt.
As if she would not have her rules appear in their bodies
if she could.
She is holding there with a harsh brilliant humming,
as they bring up her sisters like babies out of the earth.