She keeps writing
the wrong year
at the top of blank pages.
The one before this one.

She faces a white wall.
Imagines climbing it
to come home. An ache

from the strain burns
deep inside her thighs.
A PJ Harvey song
floats through her.

She’s a poet now.
A strengthening wind
cuts a metallic sky.

A sickness coats every strand
of thought, patch
of skin. Longing spreads
in square feet

across the poorest fen
to her heart. The ruler
she measures it with

smells like black honey,
sounds like Chopin
vodka bottles being pulled
from a bed of ice.

Or nothing at all
like it—
nothing at all.

Set me on fire
to awaken dormant seeds
to a hidden life.

These trees do not tell
the truth
I can whisper to you.

I am my own invasive species
waiting to be reduced
to carbon and ash.

Someone tell me
where I can find the map
to my true water regime.

I wait in rushes
for the right one
to unroll at my feet.

The one that will lead
to a mire
native to my heart.

Not gonna be about holy rollers
going at it outside a tavern
on a Sunday morning.

Not gonna try to define this 24 hour
heatwave in October
after a killing frost
saying that other thing

Not gonna capture one image
of a late season lady
beetle on the fence
with a thousand words

Not gonna measure
a life’s worth
with a sounding line or hug.

Not gonna say never say never.
Not gonna say never forget
having already forgotten why.

Gonna rest
on this buoy
for a spell.

when an F-hole
might have been confused
with an S descending

near the end
of happiness

before minor key
tunes played on a fiddle
got recorded or written down

after the U
in colour fell

on an uncleared trail
in the Berkshires
and the O and R refused

to rescue it
during Noah Webster’s lifetime

and I will never forget
those walks inside
the Grove Street Cemetery

will always wonder
what story antedates the mystery
of A Mother’s Grave