Here is where I grew upwards; Here is where my roots grow down

My dad lit a woodfire
before going to bed.
In the sighing quiet
of the night, I decided to
let the dog in to warm himself
while I read by the
living light of a treestump
that had sprouted a hundred years
before I was born.

I stepped outside the box
of the home I grew up in
to call the dog in a whisper.

My body weight packed the gray snow
as I waded away
from the orange-lit windows.
Farther and farther
with quivering skin.
My breath was the only fog
between me and the black, black
distance of the extinct starlight.

I heard every whisper
uttered by the bare purple lilac branches,
the waist-length grass of the field
burdened with snow,
the centenarian cellar deep below.

My dog approached me, having heard
my footsteps.
He watched me for a moment,
both of us sharing the same
cold air tonight,
both of us revolving
around the sun.

I smile and he trots over,
wagging his black tail against my thigh.
I want to stay out here and do
as dogs do,
running from field to field,
sniffing low to the ground
and finding the woods behind
the house an alien planet
with a familiar geography.

But I’m cold. I will never
live here and my dog’s
brown eyes wait for me to move.
We were both born
into an old world,
yet you can hardly
call us children.
How did we begin
to call this place ours?

My Body is Named With It

My joints creak with your
absence as if I am years older.
Bones meet,
crippling themselves with their
own mechanism.
I click when I walk,
the pocks in my sockets
rap a staccato rhythm.

Aching marrow inverts the
dark hollows of my body—
atriums, wombs, cavities,
sick puss suddenly released
into my blood.
My tongue tastes
the bitter vinegar of loneliness.

The cool spackle on white drywall
feels like diagrams
under my fingertips
that map my biology—
Pelvic.
Bowls and floors.
I can no longer eat.
My stomach shrivels acidic and dark.

These sockets are empty.
This coupling of bone
on a hinge has grown hard.

Two moving planes that
meet in one place—breaking.

Nature's Laws are Constant

and this has always been always.

When I was a child,
I was afraid of thunderstorms
at night
and I would look to the
purple horizon
as it quivered with lightning
and think it
was a hand reaching
for me
out of the soft
veiny folds of the night sky.

I was aware of my wet brain
and spindly limbs
close to the ground.

Now, I want
to stand exposed to the storm –
the clash of thunder
the thrill of being so small,
just a wet brain in an empty field.
Now, I want
to feel those arms around me
and forgive them
for what they have done.
For lighting that first fire
in all of us.

A Funny Logic (Revised)

Summer made you drip
and sing wind
like a leaf on a tree
like a leaf on a tree
Your body has to run inside these colors
It has to exhale
flocks of sparrows
from a bough
that shudders

Sand in my hands
cupped like the bowl
of your hips
Our bodies have to ripple into waves
You chose me
You chose me
to jump with
and hold our breaths
like a leaf on a tree

Treatise

A found poem

I.
I carried Wordsworth in with me
and carved it onto the walls
of my dark prison cell
so we could surround ourselves with love.

II.
We: me and the others
who will live here after
I am no longer on Earth.

III.
I want these words to revolve
around the sun
like the moons of Jupiter.

IIII.
Even though no light
could ever touch these walls.

Nature writing

I just read the personal narratives of Alexander von Humboldt, an early 19th century naturalist. Now I'm reading Darwin. I'm starting to understand how views of the natural world have changed - in two hundred years the earth went from a force to be conquered and used to a force that is part of us, an awe-full force to be nurtured.
I'm embarking on several new "nature" poems that examine the interplay between the internal spirit and the exterior world from which everything originates.
Coincidentally, I have three already about my dog, which snuck up on me. He's 11 now and he broke his hip this summer. In many ways, I know him better than some people in my life. "Man's best friend," they say./More like "Man's first love."

September Falls in Mount Pleasant, Michigan (another revisioning)

The days lit orange, draining
westward behind horizons.
Leaves burn so gold they sting
my eye, September cut and spilled
already when I wasn't watching.
I didn't notice green had bled
again, the soil: cellar damp.

The summer fled centuries
ago – ages steeped and gone
underground. My feet
press on paper-thin graves.

A maple sheds away the dead,
while these veins are tied to bone,
these cells wither dry within.
For this you will outlive me.

As a reprieve, you drop a leaf
to my cheek where it falls
to kiss me and bless me before I die.