The Carrying Read online

  win the grueling mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes.

  Then the horse comes out, first just casually trotting

  with his lead horse, and all at once, a brief break

  in the storm, and he’s racing against no one

  but himself and the official clockers, monstrously

  fast and head down so we can see that faded star

  flash on his forehead like this is real gladness.

  As the horse eases up and all of us close our mouths

  to swallow, the big-talking guy next to us folds his arms,

  says what I want to say too: I take it all back.

  DANDELION INSOMNIA

  The big-ass bees are back, tipsy, sun drunk

  and heavy with thick knitted leg warmers

  of pollen. I was up all night again so today’s

  yellow hours seem strange and hallucinogenic.

  The neighborhood is lousy with mowers, crazy

  dogs, and people mending what winter ruined.

  What I can’t get over is something simple, easy:

  How could a dandelion seed head seemingly

  grow overnight? A neighbor mows the lawn

  and bam, the next morning, there’s a hundred

  dandelion seed heads straight as arrows

  and proud as cats high above any green blade

  of manicured grass. It must bug some folks,

  a flower so tricky it can reproduce asexually,

  making perfect identical selves, bam, another me,

  bam, another me. I can’t help it—I root

  for that persecuted rosette so hyper in its

  own making it seems to devour the land.

  Even its name, translated from the French

  dent de lion, means lion’s tooth. It’s vicious,

  made for a time that requires tenacity, a way

  of remaking the toughest self while everyone

  else is asleep.

  DREAM OF THE RAVEN

  When the ten-speed, lightweight bicycle broke down

  off the highway lined thick with orange trees, I noticed

  a giant raven’s head protruding from the waxy leaves.

  The bird was stuck somehow, mangled in the branches,

  crying out. Wide-eyed, I held the bird’s face close to mine.

  Beak to nose. Dark brown iris to dark brown iris. Feather

  to feather. This was not the Chihuahuan raven or the fan-

  tailed raven or the common raven. Nothing was common

  about the way we stared at one another while a stranger

  untangled the bird’s claws from the tree’s limbs and he, finally

  free, became a naked child swinging in the wind.

  THE VISITOR

  A neighborhood tuxedo cat’s walking the fence line

  and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning.

  The louder they bark, the more their vexation grows,

  the less the cat seems to care. She’s behind my raised

  beds now, no doubt looking for the family of field mice

  I’ve been leaving be because why not? The cat’s

  dressed up for this occasion of trespass, formal

  attire for the canine taunting, but the whole clamor

  is making me uneasy. This might be what growing

  older is. My problem: I see all the angles of what

  could go wrong so I never know what side to be on.

  Save the mice, shoo the cat, quiet the dogs? Let

  the cat have at it? Let the dogs have at it? Instead,

  I do what I do best: nothing. I watch the cat

  leap into the drainage ditch, dew-wet fur against

  the daylilies, and disappear. The dogs go quiet

  again, and the mice are safe in their caves, and

  I’m here waiting for something to happen to me.

  LATE SUMMER AFTER A PANIC ATTACK

  I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves,

  the lobed edges leaning toward the window

  like an unwanted male gaze on the backside

  (they wish to bless and bless and hush).

  What if I want to go devil instead? Bow

  down to the madness that makes me. Drone

  of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag

  erected, a dog bark from three houses over,

  and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting,

  dead branch breaking but not breaking, stones

  from the sea next to stones from the river,

  unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat,

  a siren whining high toward town repeating

  that the emergency is not here, repeating

  that this loud silence is only where you live.

  BUST

  I’m driving alone in the predawn

  dark to the airport, nerves nearly gone

  when I fly now, gravity only another holy

  thing to contend with, what pushes us

  down squeezing out the body’s air.

  The shock jock’s morning jawing clangs

  in its exaggerated American male register

  to tell us how the twenty-four-year-old Colombian

  woman whose breasts had been hacked

  open and stuffed with one kilogram

  of cocaine swiftly admitted the smuggled

  property because she was in dire agony.

  Wounds rupturing, raging infection,

  she was rushed to a Berlin hospital.

  Her three kids were home in her country

  where she worked in agriculture, another

  word for cultivation of land, for making

  something out of dirt. The rude radio

  disc jockey licks his lips into the studio’s mic

  and says something about motorboating

  her tits jammed with nose candy and I’m

  thinking of my friend who’s considering

  a mastectomy to stay alive, another who

  said she’d cut them off herself if it meant

  living. Passport and boots that slip on and off,

  a sleepy stream through the radiation

  machine. A passive pat-down of my outline

  and I’m heading somewhere else before

  the world has even woken up. I’ve got shit

  to do and I need to lose a little weight before

  I turn older. There’s the email scan of the bank

  statement showing barely enough, the IRS

  check, the dentist that’ll have to wait until

  payday next month. We do what we have

  to do to not cleave the body too quickly.

  I wait for my zone to be called and line

  up with all the others, the woman’s voice

  over the intercom’s buzz reminding us

  the flight is full, reminding us to carry

  only what we need. The chill rises

  up in the jet bridge as does the tremor

  in my chest as we board, this shiver of need

  that moves my hand to my breastbone,

  some small gesture of tenderness for this

  masterpiece of anatomy I cling to.

  DEAD STARS

  Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.

  Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.

  Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels

  so mute it’s almost in another year.

  I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

  We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out

  the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

  It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue

  recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn

  some new constellations.

  And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,

  Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

  But mostly we’re forgetting we�
��re dead stars too, my mouth is full

  of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

  to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward

  what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

  Look, we are not unspectacular things.

  We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

  would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

  What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.

  No, to the rising tides.

  Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

  What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

  for the safety of others, for earth,

  if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

  if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big

  people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

  rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

  DREAM OF DESTRUCTION

  We somehow knew the electric orange volcanic ooze

  of hot lava was bound to bury us all, little spurts of ash

  popping early like precum and not innocuous at all

  blasted into the sky like a warning siren on the horizon.

  The air felt different. The sky felt different. You felt different.

  Still, there I was down in the valley where I was born, coyotes

  on the ridges of the Mayacamas, turning over the steamy earth

  to plant a garden. You were standing on the steps, staring

  out at the sky’s ominous openings, a mouth of terrible red,

  like a tongue that’d been bitten so often it was not a tongue

  but a bloody wound with which the earth tried to speak. I held

  that black rake in my hand like a weapon. I was going to rake

  until that goddamn lava came and killed us. I was going

  to rake and rake and rake, feverishly and mean, until the fertile

  dirt knew I was willing to die trying.

  PREY

  The muffled, ruptured voice of a friend

  turns into an electrical signal and breaks open

  to tell me her sister has died. A muted pause,

  then a heaving. Sounds sucked from lungs.

  Outside, as the sun descends to inch-high

  on the fallow horizon, a hawk grasp-lands

  on the telephone pole. Brawny and barrel-

  chested, it perches eyeing the late winter

  seed head of switchgrass. Later, we’re talking

  about self-care, being strong, surviving

  a long time. The hawk launches as the sun

  oozes puce and ochre and sinks. I write

  to another friend who says her partner

  is like a hawk—steadfast, wary. I think

  of the sharp-shinned hunters, the Cooper’s,

  the Swainson’s, how hawks are both serene

  and scary as hell, scary that is, if you’re

  the mouse. That’s the trick, we say,

  isn’t it? Don’t be the mouse.

  2

  THE BURYING BEETLE

  I like to imagine even the plants

  want attention, so I weed for four

  hours straight, assuring the tomatoes

  feel July’s hot breath on the neck,

  the Japanese maple can stretch,

  the sweet potatoes, the spider plants,

  the Asiatic lilies can flourish in this

  place we’ve dared to say we “own.”

  Each nicked spindle of morning glory

  or kudzu or purslane or yellow rocket

  (Barbarea vulgaris for Christ’s sake),

  and I find myself missing everyone I know.

  I don’t know why. First come the piles

  of nutsedge and creeper and then an

  ache that fills the skin like the Cercospora

  blight that’s killing the blue skyrocket juniper

  slowly from the inside out. Sure, I know

  what it is to be lonely, but today’s special

  is a physical need to be touched by someone

  decent, a pulsing palm to the back. My man

  is in South Africa still, and people just keep

  dying even when I try to pretend like they’re

  not. The crown vetch and the curly dock

  are almost eliminated as I survey the neatness

  of my work. I don’t feel I deserve this time,

  or the small plot of earth I get to mold into

  someplace livable. I lost God awhile ago.

  And I don’t want to pray, but I can picture

  the plants deepening right now into the soil,

  wanting to live, so I lie down among them,

  in my ripped pink tank top, filthy and covered

  in sweat, among red burying beetles and dirt

  that’s been turned and turned like a problem

  in the mind.

  HOW WE ARE MADE

  For Philip Levine

  For months, I was a cannonball

  dropped down the bore, reeling

  in blurry vomitous swirls toward

  the fuse; forty days with vertigo

  is like that. My new equilibrium

  was spinning inside the chambers

  of spherical blackness when the news

  came. You, with your wiry limbs

  of hard verse, inky gap-toothed grin

  of gristle and work, you who grimly

  told us to stop messing around,

  to make this survival matter

  like a factory line, like fish scaling,

  like filament and rubble, you

  who would say, most likely,

  this was all sentimental crap, you

  had gone to cinders, blasted

  into the ether without so much

  as smoke. I stood then on the icy hill

  under the expressway, filled

  with the salt you had given me,

  and for the first time that year,

  my entire world stood still.

  THE LIGHT THE LIVING SEE

  For Adam & Michael

  We’re stopped in Subiaco

  to lay stones on stone

  at a fellow penner’s grave

  where we jaw, punchdrunk

  and carsick, about being buried

  or burned up. I don’t want

  to take up any more space,

  I tell the boys, both fathers now,

  who, shaped like trees, lean

  toward the earth. I imagine

  their old daughters leaving a slice

  of gas station moon pie,

  rye, a nickel-plated acorn, ladies

  picnicking in the shade of a pine

  as immobile as the body’s husk.

  Chemicals and maggots, sure,

  but also a place to grieve, a creek,

  a constellation of death to count on.

  These men know something

  I don’t. That someone will grieve

  past their bones, count on them

  to be there among the shaded trunks

  of pines like the stark bars

  of a generous cage.

  (What if no one comes to the cliffside

  where my skin’s ashes set sail?

  No mourning kin, no lost hitchhiker.)

  But friends, it’s lunchtime,

  and doesn’t my mouth still work;

  my appetite, my forked tongue?

  THE DEAD BOY

  It was spring then too, and the Southern grass

  was thick with ant legs and needling beetles.

  The day was all lemonade and meditation

  on the true-blue atmosphere that held me

  in the palm of quietude and survival. But,

  from the summer-thinned dorm rooms, a young

  woman came running, her oversized T-shirt

  billowing, her straight brown hair wild as
she

  begged us to call 9-1-1. Because we were

  the adults, Fred and I ran toward the stale

  hollow room where, already purple with death’s

  permanent hue, the boy was gone. But Fred,

  being a father, and maybe more hopeful,

  tried to revive him. So I tried too. Turned

  him to see the ruined face like a petaled

  jellyfish washed to the stormy shore.

  I don’t want to admit this, but I hated

  him. Hated his face that I already knew

  I’d see forever, hated the needle on the waxy

  dorm room desk, hated the dorm, hated

  the kid I loved back in college who mainlined

  until his too-high pal had a seizure, hated

  my ex who had died that way a different spring.

  I hated the world, the pain of it that circles in us,

  that makes us want to be the moon,

  the treasure, and not the thing on the sea

  floor. Later, I found out his name was Griffin,

  part lion, part eagle, named for the king

  of the creatures, named the guardian

  of riches. And because symbols matter, I try

  to say his name: Griffin, Griffin, but because

  language matters too, I have to tell you: I did not

  feel like I was laying down a lion, or a king,