PelicanDeath

Walking carefully after the theater as if up high, or top heavy. Cresting waves of light on the screen, figures so fully themselves it ached. My tasks not so arched, my voice not that loud. There is soft rain over the paved lot & a silence waits inside my car. All I can do is feel.

sometimes I am tall and stern unsmiling in my power full of spine and spines and sometimes I am feather-soft silver leaves sprawling on the soil awaiting feet and fingers for my blossoms sometimes I am a bitter brew, swirling and full of dark moon prophesies and awful knowing and sometimes I am beestings milk golden sweet and saving precious things each season meant to take its turn each shift part of this spiral dance of life and love and hurt and hope and death and me: both tomb and womb of these conflicting truths some mornings there is sunlight some mornings there is fog or frost or thunder and black waves no moon is always full all night skies keep graves of their own making graves of their former selves

I You are the empty field stone colored & sky swift so gray you turn purple as if it were evening already I stand at the edge rasping long grass ready to cross II Does the earth weep? Like a wound say the geese gliding over the water Like notes in a song III Wind dogpiles the morning & a willow tree clutches my favorite crook of the river I hold water in my palms to watch my face change shape wondering How full would my hands have to be to change the rest IV Inside the faintest nub of seed & in past the flotation of atoms beneath the thin layer of universe there is a slick dome over something else & everything I've poured out so carefully just scatters