Poetry

great reindeer

I can call your name quietly, if you wish

or I can scream it across the deserted

shore as the waves thunder onto the 

firmly packed sand and lash the dunes

if you’re looking for me you can find me

among the marble and slate monuments

to the long turned dust and the freshly buried, 

watching as the crows fly eerily overhead

golden summer light begins to darken 

until you have equal parts: light and dark

mabon, the harvest, the moon throwing

half a stone, the goldenrod ripening

and calling to the bumblebees drawing

competition from the tenderly pink amaranth

I can call your name three times and

you’ll be back here with me in my garden

throw a coin over my right shoulder and

make a wish I can point out the great reindeer

in the sky but I cannot make you look

if your eyes are bound for the earth

Stone carvers

in a past life I was a gravestone carver-

spending my days shoulders hunched over slabs of slate

etching again and again into chipping stone

green slate erodes with the wind and the rain

too soft, too porous its words become braille

as a child I preferred the rain and its moodiness

I carry that past melancholy into this life,

when I was young I preferred to wander 

the old burial grounds,

to speak the names of the long dead

those whose bones have turned to dust

turned to dirt, mixed with the soil in which

I planted my garden, 

bones turned back into earth

my native languages are 

first: death

second: english

I wear skeletons for teeth

the doomed and departed dance on the 

tip of my tongue

I hide the reaper in my throat

wingèd seraphs flash across my dreams

when I dare close my eyes

in a past life I was a gravestone carver

fixated on the dead for my living

I made many tombstones for the strangers and the saints

but the day I died my sons closed our shop

dropped the tools to gather dust where they lay

the year lost to time, all shrouded in mystery

I lay buried in an unmarked grave 

forgotten with nary a marker or even a letter

when the thaw of spring comes 

the old burial grounds catch fire 

with the ephemerals and the blooming grasses

the superstitious never forage in the graveyard-

leave the mushrooms for the dead

the living have taken enough today

Too salty

once I told you my chinese name

高玉环

but you couldn’t pronounce it

you said you didn’t like the taste

of the food I cooked

that the spices were all wrong

that I kept crying in the food

and making it too salty

you were always mad at me

always keeping me leashed to you

once you told me if I didn’t open

my front door 

that you would jump off the bridge

and I believed you so 

I opened the door but-

you said you didn’t like my attitude

since I found out that they were gone

gone before I even heard the crash

asked me when I would get over it

while he still lay in that coma

you told me to stop crying into my food

and complaining that it’s too salty