a collection of poems that i want to have on hand.
This time of year, the window boxes smell of the hills,
the thyme and rosemary that grew there,
crammed into the narrow spaces between the rocks
and, lower down, where there was real dirt,
competing with other things, blueberries and currants,
the small shrubby trees the bees love—
Whatever we ate smelled of the hills,
even when there was almost nothing.
Or maybe that’s what nothing tastes like, thyme and rosemary.
Maybe, too, that’s what it looks like—
beautiful, like the hills, the rocks above the tree line
webbed with sweet smelling herbs,
the small plants glittering with dew—
It was a big event to climb up there and wait for dawn,
seeing what the sun sees as it slides out from behind the rocks,
and what you couldn’t see, you imagined;
it’s been January for months in both directions frost
over grass like pale fungus like
mothdust the branches of the pear tree are pickling
in ice white as the long white line running from me
to the smooth whales frozen in chunks of ocean
from their vast bobbing to the blackwhite
stars flowering into heaven the hungry cat gnaws
on a sliver of mirror and I have been chewing
out my stitches wondering which
warm names we should try singing
wild thyme cowslip blacksnake all the days
in a year line up at the door and I deflect each saying no
you will not be needed one by one they skulk off
into the cold the cat hates this place more than he loves
me he cannot remember the spring when I fed him
warm duck fat daily nor the kitchen vase filled with musky blue
roses nor the pear tree which was so eager to toss its fruit so sweet
it made us sleepy I stacked the pears on the mantle
until I ran out of the room and began filling them into
the bathtub one evening I slid in as if into a mound
of jewels now ghost finches leave footprints
on our snowy windowsills the cat paces
through the night listening for their chirps our memories
have frosted over ages ago we guzzled
all the rosewater in the vase still we check for it
nightly I have forgotten even
the easy prayer I was supposed to use
in emergencies something something I was not
born here I was not born here I was not