NEW POEMS
Becoming Bobcat
Become the bobcat; let her take and eat
the house cat.
My God—that’s the lesson? This is what I’ve walked into?
Become the bobcat; let her take and eat the house cat.
I was just standing there, I said.
I was just watering my hedges again when a wind came
clearing through—
I was a house on stilts and from beneath me the wild one lit out,
a bobcat, and it burned through this scene of me like an owl or an eagle
or fire through grass, burning out and into the wild forest beyond me,
the bobcat taking with her—to eat—my very own house cat,
the house cat I had tended
from birth to birth,
the cushion-like cat,
the milk-fed cat,
the agnostic cat,
the cat who was never sure what to do.
Middle Distance
A specific road, chalk-dust white, and specific trees along it,
those sparse markers of me—and I of them—striding, intent—
Intent, or enfolded in some unknown-to-me intent, striding
and thinking of that fragile, lovely, specific whomever—
crush, friend, twin, child, prayer,
how I’ve always wanted an other—
My concerns are very human:
a day moon, a dog, a cave along that road for thunder.
Feral You
Lumbering, crepuscular, you were
an obscure & golden loss, or in some other way
pregnant: the mouth of an eclipse ( )
radiant and darkening.
Confluence
Cruces Basin, NM
A creviced height of lichen-patched granite
cleaves, tufted, sparse with wind-grass
and false lupine blossoming, a towering crag,
a perch perpetually slow-mo, slow at least
to the ants who have civilized this place,
ants carrying ant languages, ant lineages
in dark red mouths: leaflets or stars of bright mica—
and too in this broad mouth leans a lean pine,
swoons a red-shafted flicker’s flight, swoons
aspens shaking in mat-green currency, and lower,
light alights on purple asters, and flowering lower,
rising sounds, a confluence of waters.
