Bury
by Iris Moulton
I am from over there, the one you’ve read about.
In the heat
of spring and summer we lay artifacts to the ground: a clay pot
in which we carried the words of lovers, flint tools to hunt them
down. Winter will always bury this. We wait for the tomb
longer than the resurrection; knowing pulls our hours
like a hide. In the thaw
we will start again, harvest amongst the shards.
Snakes in the rushes come
to swallow whole the eggs of the killdeer
as she dances. We say watch where you step,
more to protect our dangers
from being chased too far. Someone has pulled a fawn from
the trail over there, broken, still spotted. Her eyes are wet bubbles against
air. I am glad we can still die out here; it’s why we came.
You, sister, have come to believe the jackrabbit
and hare are good luck, symbols of rebirth. You are
ready to lay a foundation, see the shape
of a strange new shelter. One night the sky was big
and its blackness made tiny globes around us. We were sitting
at a truck-stop and the bottle was cool against our hands. You said
There’s one but I couldn’t see it. I kept squinting but all
you could say was over there over there
The wood of our houses was painted
to look richer. My parents
wrote this but never wrote it down. Silkworms spun our funeral dresses
and baptismal gowns. Wasps with nests papered of
wanted posters. We once shot blindly against the hillside over there. Use every
part of the animal; our people emerged full-bellied and adorned.
The trees are skinny and sick, and can’t hide us.
Bury them where they fall, we will be guided by the sound of
boots on hollow ground, and this becomes the stone lined trail. Home.
We hunker over there in the hills, in gullies spotted
with cookfires. Wolves strip pearls off the fallen
for teeth. He, that most terrible instrument, Destroying Angel, made
of his own hair a wig for a typhoid widow. She was a grandmother of mine.
When she wore it the whisper
of his ghosts came through her eyes.
I must have been thinking of the usual things that night
lofted above sobriety, and our one street left where outlaws still strut
and pose. Below us lilac, cherry trees. Bird calls and lovers voices
blossom into the air. Wine stained lips and floors, someone
over there laughing at how young the world was getting without him.
It was, for me, the usual small sadnesses creeping through. How twilight draws the city closer as if to listen.
How many there were of us who had never spoken
but had been meeting each other such a long time. Your hand
nodding as if to sleep against my thigh. Stretched on different timelines
nothing and everything matter so much.
You are allowed a cot, a blanket, a chest with a broken lock.
It will come back. Spring leaves us wondering if winter is ever gone, or just
hiding on the mountain over there, waiting to tumble down if provoked.
It will be one white sheet for one abandoned
corpse. It will make for us one grave. We have been practicing
for generations to tremble from cold and not fear, to change
the color of snow with our enemies.
You may hold another’s hand through this, and it may be your own.
Take inventory of what is left and what is new
when it begins again.
original poem copyright 2009 by Iris Moulton
my point is, really, that you can purchase it from me on paypal. the paypal address to request a book: iris.moulton@gmail.com. with shipping the total comes to $14.50. just sayin. cuz... money would help me move and less books would help me move too. 
