12 There must be a word for candles snapping curtains drifting cool air sinking through open windows bare feet under blankets warm despite the chill and stars breaking on the windowsill.
14 Dress me in my favorite green sweater and lay me on the earth beside the river where my skin might take root in the moss and the lilac might grow over my fingers and the honeysuckle kiss my hair where you might have if you decided to bury yourself with me in the soft riverbed where ivy dulls the sound of water and you can smell the way it longs to reverse, wind back to the springs in the mountains where flowers won't grow but the stars are so close you can hold them on your tongue.
15 When I was seven I reached into the gutter my fingers sticky from strawberries picked off cakes shaped like the 4th of July, blushed red skin stretched over knobby shoulder and soft knees; I burnt my thumb on the wrong end of a sparkler that sizzled when I'd dropped it in the thick green algae that made the concrete slick and which we harvested for science experiments in our fort beneath the trampoline. I don't know what sparklers are made of but there's still a scar across my fingers where I held on too long, waiting for something to change.
17 Crooked, dry, there are no leaves on the dead-end tree where the corn dust (or was it beans, that year?) sticks to our fingers and the popsicles we dug from the freezer
we crawled into the storm drain slick with algae and rainwater, the tall grass hid us from our mothers worry-tired dead-end housewives, daughters looking to bury themselves in concrete
It was cooler inside, and we were afraid to turn the corner.
18 I planted berries in the windowbox despite it being small and with a crack in the wood as long as the wind that rattles the shutters. They told me that growth is relative, there are no small parts, but when the fruit came up round and hard it shattered bitter on my tongue.
19 I drove with my parents into the redwoods where the signs read be aware of the bears, the lions, the elk and fires or rocks falling through the trees. The car we left in an empty gravel lot was soaked with dust and photos of the bear cub we watched from the side of the road. Stay on the trail, my father told me while he climbed fallen trees over dry riverbeds, the bears are only a problem if you let your voice fall quieter than the wind through the trees. We found a grove of redwoods and I thought, what about the lions while people I hadn't watched pass us on the trail took photos for magazines we'd never read. An elk is not that much unlike a deer, like the white tails that sifted through the bushes and stooped maples out the back window of our house. I wanted someone to explain to me what about the ancient trunks and dusky red bark that came off in my hands would have been less beautiful in a place where I was less afraid.
20 "If he wasn't three times bigger 'en me I'd break him like a dry stick," over a rock in the holler past my great grandmother's house is a place where the earth dips like a valley, but it's crooked and broken and no one lives in the bottom of a holler but there's a braided rope where if you balance on the right knot your dad'll push you out over the edge and you can nearly see the place the old farm must have been on the other side, the old place your dad would run to in the middle of the night when the lantern oil ran out because in some places that was still the case. When you were there, there was no lantern oil or coals in bedframes or outhouses colder 'en heck. Your great grandmother let you pick gourds out of the side garden and sit in the old root cellar where she kept decades of peaches in dusty jars no one would dare eat. Later, when you'd go back it's after Aunt Joyce stole the will and the farm and robbed the family dry of memory; the old barn is still there, and the house but we don't own the land and your dad stands in the old road remembering what it was like to run through the holler at night for lantern oil and granddad's smoked-out voice when he complained, "the beatings and floggings will continue until morale has improved!"
21 This is what we talk about when we talk about voices through the floorboards and lanterns lit by shattered stars; our hair is wet and tangled with daisies like nightmares half remembered. This is what we say when we say I draw the three of swords, whisper break her heart soft enough it rattles the apartment windowpanes clouded by candlesmoke and dashed hope. This is what we sigh when I say, in our hush, it is a broken deck it was not given me by a witch or a mother or a soft hand that has loved these cards (I am usurper I am thief) these cards will not speak true of me, but this is what we talk about when we talk we talk we talk.
23 To season your cast-iron skillet, scrub the rust and burnt-on breakfasts or late night drunken quesadillas with coarse salt and a potato if you have it, or a dry towel if you don't. Coat the skillet with more oil than your mother finds appropriate for your health (she didn't teach you this, anyway, or how to make dumplings or corn muffins or any of those things her mother didn't teach her) and bake face down in the oven at 375 or whatever feels right, this was never meant to be a science. Let your cast-iron skillet cool in the oven and swear to yourself you'll take better care of it from now on.
24 Homesick does not account for the way I remember cool grass on a summer day or the crack of soybean pods in sunburnt hands or hills rolling under highways and brick farm houses.
25 I'd be lying if I said I don't think about your pickup truck parked by the lake or the way you'd push me into the seat when headlights crawled across the lot, tangled in our hair. I remember you in pieces the way fingertips remember the simple coil of muscles in shoulders or the smell of deodorant filling the cab of a white pickup truck. It's someone else's face I try to kiss; at twenty-five I'm intoxicated by the memory of teenage sexuality but darling, you kill my buzz.
26 There are skeletons in your underwear drawer, you have a closet but the folding doors fell off the track six years ago and you can't bother to move out let alone phone the maintenance guy besides he might find the past sulking in your socks folded like your ex liked you forget the way your mother taught you, you forget a lot of things your mother taught you.
The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. — Edward Hirsch
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