The Carrying Read online

  or an eagle, but a poor suffering son, and even

  if I hate these words and the drug that dragged

  him there, he is etched in my mind, named

  in language forever and only as: dead boy,

  dead boy, and gone.

  WHAT I WANT TO REMEMBER

  Right before General Vallejo’s home,

  with its stately stone and yellow walls,

  there’s a field along the footpath

  where spring rains bring the frogs,

  a whole symphony of them, breaking

  open the hours just after the sun

  sinks into the Pacific Ocean only

  an hour away. Why am I placing

  you here? I’m on a plane going west

  and all the humans are so loud

  it hurts the blood. But once I sat

  next to a path that was still warm

  from the day’s heat, cross-legged

  with my friend named Echo who taught

  me how to amplify the strange sound

  the frogs made by cupping my ears.

  I need to hold this close within me,

  when today’s news is full of dead children,

  their faces opening their mouths for air

  that will not come. Once I was a child too

  and my friend and I sat for maybe an hour,

  eyes adjusting to the night sky, cupping

  and uncupping our ears to hear

  the song the tenderest animals made.

  OVERPASS

  The road wasn’t as hazardous then,

  when I’d walk to the steel guardrail,

  lean my bendy girl body over, and stare

  at the cold creek water. In a wet spring,

  the water’d run clear and high, minnows

  mouthing the sand and silt, a crawdad

  shadowed by the shore’s long reeds.

  I could stare for hours, something

  always new in each watery wedge—

  a bottle top, a man’s black boot, a toad.

  Once, a raccoon’s carcass, half under

  the overpass, half out, slowly decayed

  over months. I’d check on him each day,

  watching until the white bones of his hand

  were totally skinless and seemed to reach

  out toward the sun as it hit the water,

  showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers

  still clinging. I don’t think I worshipped

  him, his deadness, but I liked the evidence

  of him, how it felt like a job to daily

  take note of his shifting into the sand.

  THE MILLIONTH DREAM OF YOUR RETURN

  At the tequila tasting bar called Izquierda Iguana

  where the silvery agave plants were pure hydroponic

  and upside down so you had to swerve around them

  to get served, I suddenly remembered you were coming

  in that evening, a special return. I rushed to the cavernous loft

  where the power was all on one ancient grid so the lights

  flickered each time someone opened the refrigerator,

  and put on the white dress that you had once said made you look

  like an angel with its real swan feathers and fool’s gold.

  Then I sat for a long time in the night and waited. At dawn,

  I woke with feathers sticky on my tongue and I remembered

  you were dead all over again.

  BALD EAGLES IN A FIELD

  She was almost gone at that point,

  enough so we could start to make plans.

  Bright for a February near Fishtown,

  Skagit Bay another sun on the earth

  shining upward. On our way for groceries,

  we saw one eagle in a field, then another.

  I had never seen two bald eagles together

  like that, and it felt like a sign, something

  that would shift things forever, but it wasn’t

  really, it was just a moment, dad and daughter

  pulled over in the car, silent and breathing

  for a singular instance before all we knew

  took flight.

  I’M SURE ABOUT MAGIC

  After the artist Dario Robleto

  With dust from every bone in the body,

  and the strange material trinitite (a glass

  forged in the heat of the 1945 atomic blasts),

  the artist makes a spell for the dead. Me?

  I cross the wide river the same color as trees,

  thinking what could I excavate, melt, smash

  of yours. The copper pots you bought to last

  turned into a heavy necklace for all to see

  like Cleopatra and her beloved Caesar coins,

  late August, hot, overripe trailing black

  dewberries cooked into an inky purple stain

  for a tattoo on the wrist, juniper-laden cold gin

  mixed with beeswax and lit from a stolen match

  all wasted like your too-short life down the drain.

  WONDER WOMAN

  Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi

  after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well,

  sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard

  for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled

  in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken

  a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle

  with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees

  bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics

  villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both

  a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,

  said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side

  grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,

  brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,

  out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,

  dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.

  She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,

  eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),

  she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—

  a woman, by a river, indestructible.

  THE REAL REASON

  I don’t have any tattoos is not my story to tell. It’s my

  mother’s. Once, walking down Bedford Avenue in my twenties,

  I called her as I did, as I do. I told her how I wanted a tattoo

  on the back of my neck. Something minor, but permanent,

  and she is an artist, I wanted her to create the design, a symbol,

  a fish I dream of every night. An underwater talisman, a mother’s

  gift on my body. To be clear, I thought she’d be honored. But do we

  ever really know each other fully? A silence like a hospital room; she

  was in tears. I swore then that I wouldn’t get one. Wouldn’t let a needle

  touch my neck, my arm, my torso. I’d stay me, my skin the skin

  she welcomed me into the world with. It wasn’t until later that

  I knew it wasn’t so much the tattoo, but the marking, the idea

  of scars. What you don’t know (and this is why this is not my story)

  is that my mother is scarred from burns over a great deal of her body.

  Most from an explosion that took her first child she was carrying

  in her belly, others from the skin grafts where they took skin to cover

  what needed it. She was in her late twenties when that happened.

  Outside her studio in the center of town. You have to understand,

  my mother is beautiful. Tall and elegant, thin and strong. I have not

  known her any other way, her skin that I mapped with my young

  fingers, its strange hardness in places, its patterns like quilts here,

  riverbeds there. She’s wondrous, preternatural, survived fire,

&n
bsp; the ending of an unborn child. Heat and flame and death, all made

  her into something seemingly magical, a phoenixess. What I know

  now is she wanted something else for me. For me to wake each

  morning and recognize my own flesh, for this one thing she made—

  me—to remain how she intended, for one of us

  to make it out unscathed.

  THE YEAR OF THE GOLDFINCHES

  There were two that hung and hovered

  by the mud puddle and the musk thistle.

  Flitting from one splintered fence post

  to another, bathing in the rainwater’s glint

  like it was a mirror to some other universe

  where things were more acceptable, easier

  than the place I lived. I’d watch for them:

  the bright peacocking male, the low-watt

  female, on each morning walk, days spent

  digging for some sort of elusive answer

  to the question my curving figure made.

  Later, I learned that they were a symbol

  of resurrection. Of course they were,

  my two yellow-winged twins feasting

  on thorns and liking it.

  NOTES ON THE BELOW

  For Mammoth Cave National Park

  Tell me—humongous cavern, tell me, wet limestone, sandstone

  caprock, bat-wing, sightless translucent cave shrimp,

  this endless plummet into more of the unknown,

  tell me how one keeps secrets for so long.

  All my life, I’ve lived above the ground,

  car wheels over paved roads, roots breaking through concrete,

  and still I’ve not understood the reel of this life’s purpose.

  Not so much living, but a hovering without sense.

  What’s it like to be always night? No moon, but a few lit-up

  circles at your many openings. Endless dark, still time

  must enter you. Like a train, like a green river?

  Tell me what it is to be the thing rooted in shadow.

  To be the thing not touched by light (no, that’s not it)—

  to not even need the light? I envy; I envy that.

  Desire is a tricky thing, the boiling of the body’s wants,

  more praise, more hands holding the knives away.

  I’ve been the one who has craved and craved until I could not see

  beyond my own greed. There’s a whole nation of us.

  To forgive myself, I point to the earth as witness.

  To you, your Frozen Niagara, your Fat Man’s Misery,

  you with your 400 miles of interlocking caves that lead

  only to more of you, tell me

  what it is to be quiet, and yet still breathing.

  Ruler of the Underlying, let me

  speak to both the dead and the living as you do. Speak

  to the ruined earth, the stalactites, the eastern small-footed bat,

  to honor this: the length of days. To speak to the core

  that creates and swallows, to speak not always to what’s

  shouting, but to what’s underneath asking for nothing.

  I am at the mouth of the cave. I am willing to crawl.

  SUNDOWN & ALL THE DAMAGE DONE

  Nearly nine and still the sun’s not slunk

  into its nightly digs. The burnt-meat smell

  of midweek cookouts and wet grass

  hangs in the air like loose familiar summer

  garb. Standing by the magnolia tree, I think

  if I were to live as long as she did, I’d have

  eleven more years. And if I were to live as long

  as him, I’d have forty-nine. As long as him,

  I’d be dead already. As long as her, this

  would be my final year. There’s a strange

  contentment to this countdown, a nodding

  to this time, where I get to stand under

  the waxy leaves of the ancient genus, a tree

  that appeared before even the bees, and

  watch as fireflies land on the tough tepals

  until each broad flower glows like a torchlit

  mausoleum. They call the beetle’s conspicuous

  bioluminescence “a cold light,” but why then

  do I still feel so much fire?

  ON A LAMPPOST LONG AGO

  I don’t know what to think of first

  in the list

  of all the things that are disappearing: fishes, birds, trees, flowers, bees,

  and languages too. They say that if historical rates are averaged,

  a language will die every four months.

  In the time it takes to say I love you, or move in with someone,

  or admit to the child you’re carrying, all the intricate words

  of a language become extinct.

  There are too many things to hold in the palm of the brain.

  Your father with Alzheimer’s uses the word thing to describe

  many different nouns and we guess the word he means.

  When we get it right, he nods as if it’s obvious.

  When we get it wrong, his face closes like a fist.

  Out walking in the neighborhood, there’s a wide metal lamppost

  that has scratched into it “Brandy Earlywine loves

  Jack Pickett” and then there come the hearts. The barrage of hearts

  scratched over and over as if, just in case we have forgotten

  the word love, we will know its symbol. As if Miss Earlywine

  wanted us to know that—even after she and Mr. Pickett

  have passed on, their real hearts stopped, the ones that don’t look

  anything like those little symbols—they frantically, furiously,

  late one night under the streetlight while their parents thought

  they were asleep, inscribed onto the body of something like

  a permanent tree, a heart—so that even after their bodies

  have ceased to be bodies, their mouths no longer capable of words,

  that universal shape will tell you how she felt, one blue evening,

  long ago, when there were still 7,000 languages that named and honored

  the plants and animals each in their

  own way, when your father said thing and we knew what it meant,

  and the bees were big and round and buzzing.

  OF ROOTS & ROAMERS

  Have you ever noticed how the trees

  change from state to state? Not all

  at once, of course, more like a weaver

  gradually weaving in another color

  until the old trees become scarce

  and new trees offer a shaded kingdom

  all their own. Before I knew the names

  of towns or roads, I could recognize

  places by the trees: Northern California’s

  smooth-skinned madrone, looming eucalyptus,

  fuzzy fragrant flowers of the acacia. So

  much of America belongs to the trees.

  Even when we can’t agree on much,

  there’s still the man returning from his

  late shift at the local bar, who takes

  a long look at the bird’s nest in the maple,

  pats the trunk like a friend’s forearm,

  mumbles something about staying safe,

  and returns home. And the girl whose

  slapdash tree fort we can see from our blurry

  window, how she stands there to wave

  at a world she does not even know

  the half of yet. My grandmother once

  complained she couldn’t see much

  of America on her cross-country trip because

  it was all just trees. Ask her, she’ll laugh as she

  tells you. Still, without the bother of licenses

  or attention to a state line, a border, they

  just grow where they’ve grown all their lives:

  there, a small stand of
white pine arrives,

  there, a redwood begins to show itself along

  the coastline, water oaks in the south, willows.

  Their power is in not moving, so we must

  move to them.

  KILLING METHODS

  Outside, after grieving for days,

  I’m thinking of how we make stories,

  pluck them like beetles out of the air,