This is a serial poem in short parts, a skinny slow intense work documenting a period of personal and national catastrophe, grief, and loss.

First month:

Finn and I share a desk: home means 
propped windows, tax papers, old notebooks

two spilling suitcases

pre-rolled weed, CD-Rs, bitten-up markers
origami, astonishing beachrocks, scotch tape

Finn needs to breathe a little against me to sleep

                     *

I lie back in the arms of a Schubert sonata
and try not to think God yes, I need you

leap illimitable over my whole life
snap each melody over my shoulders

I need you, rattle me like a bottle of Advil
silhouette me

                     *

First month:

The image starts with new funny repeated faces 
of post-war quickie houses

Sparkling streets

Colossal city chestnuts nodding greenly, busting 
sidewalks, just a flex of roots

and I follow the splitlines with my feet

Or no: it starts with 

  shepherds through 

    chainlink barking 

  warily once     twice

Or no: the image starts with operative taproot 
urging grapevines 
feral up the pergola, and I follow with my eyes

                     *

Second month:

Body, bravely
             feed me peanut butter toast
lower me safe over 
thousands of split curbs

pluck a grape, burst a blackhead
breathe out, going not too soft

                     *

I run an Epsom salt bath, let it sweat me
some essential molecule of crying need 

soaking out

dissolving into water
crispy-rimmed with salt

                     *

The feeling: Water in a rusted cistern

viscous and slow, lifeless and lightless
disturbed just barely by overpassing footfalls

held
back just barely

                     *

The dream: Floodwaters, glassy silver 

and muddled violet-brown
withdrew just as they first soaked our doorstep:

Their breaker-tips probed the kale and grapevine beds
soaked the chestnuts’ roots
 
then drew back. We climbed down from the roof

Streets all sparkled as they dried

                     *

The urge: I want us both to drown

I want to
feel the fluid rush of cruel words

I want to suck that fatal 
salty water down 

I want to stagger off
lifeless after, leaving wet footprints

clothes and ribs and guts 
and ripe lungs all soggy, knowing relief

                     *

I remember, about the middle of my childhood, wide awake, watching
face-shapes silhouetted 

in the fir limbs tossing out my bedroom window—

brows lowering, cheeks sucked in with displeasure
mouths open in astonishment

                     *

Second month:

Home means ugly ripe local vegetables
taped-up photos, magazine clippings

(Kusama, Richter, Anguissola) 

Home means postwar tract housing
Window orb weaver plucking her web

dreaming of her million babies’ 
million babies

Home means the feet of Mary: 
impassive fire-ringed

Mother of God in
peasant blue who

doesn’t need calming

Prophecy of inversion and restoration
in radiating gold around her toes, at tips of sienna hair

Home means the unceasing respiration
and clitoral flicker of candleflame, old high habit of prayer

                     *

Brushstroke and breaker-tip of 
morning clouds, constitute me

be lightness for my memory

be 
mutability for my grief

                     *

In their rain-soaked clay the mycorrhizal networks—-
a mile of living gossamer stretched through each cubic meter—-

join fir to fir, faint pulses 
and steering tugs

                     *

Mad on a walk, Finn rips up sword ferns

Home means the nautilus-curl 
of a Bach lute suite

just this side of morning window half-open onto wild mint
and spider-season spiders

(about the middle of their season 
of dauntless mating)

Home means Finn’s little body filling out, popping elbows
handling crystals, squirming under hairbrush

                     *

I once said I want to lie in rain

But my heart now needs 
shelter and electric heat

Simple cell, spilling suitcase, two pallets

Too sad for early mercy
Too skinny to withstand the multiplied rain

Tangled in my nerves’ mile of 
mycorrhizal gossamer

Smashed by the sweet sap-smell of every generous fir

Photograph of chain link fence with plants by Taylor Hammersla on Unsplash.

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