Yard
Maybe cruelty haunts the laundry like a lost art.
Maybe there's a coarseness to being born twice:
once by dye, once by finally.
That could be what sets the hung sheets quivering.
I wouldn't know. I only know that at the age
when most women are rolling their daughters in oats,
baking them high and lonely
I am crawling away from the small lion
who chews with my gums, who knows
how to lick envelopes closed with my tongue.
Long I've avoided the low grass, although
my hands love green that's done deepening.
Maybe there's a cruelty crouched in possibility,
all answers, whether prefaced yes or no.
What I know is a house holding skies in its windows.
A fence contains the lawn like a trainer
who doesn't trust tameness.
I come gnawing the planks like the sun chewing
through hallways of paintings, spilling
the purples and reds, bending the frames
like rippling sheets with my urgency.
Already I am abandoning the beast
whose maw fit my socket, who wouldn't hark
to my name, slipping under the fence-edge
into the canvas I'm wild to know.
