Specimens, Days

  The rain delicate over the eaves, On broad leaves of fireweed & nettle. Like a child Tiptoeing the dawn hallway, Columnar light balustrading Floorboards. Clouds build up Come late afternoon, roiling bulbous Blooms balanced along the ridge.  The glacier melts, river rises, Footprints & shabby, hurried tipis Of driftwood borne along. They Are our dailiness– the things we cannot change, Misk. We are embedded in them, Of them, grasping past to feign An agency we cannot possess. Our Eurydice worlds. We march meanwhile To songs we’ve tooled into allegiances. Looking b ack, the worlds slip from us & into t he light we spill, all battlefield &  Barbarism. All life is forfeit. I Am ashamed, Misk. I sing your name  Into the maw of brutalities & let its tender syllable resound.

  Water will collect in the nasturtiums’ Cup, broad leaves swaying top-heavy In mounting breeze. Funneled to center, It forms one clear round jewel, refracted light, Prismatic, seeming solid. Only The wind to spur its spilling or sun To spell its end.  On a ridgeline behind Panguingue Creek years ago we awakened with five wolves Surrounding us. A moose limped in a furrowed  Creek & we were the accident in the circumference of  The hunt.    Years prior we saw them, the wolves, Braiding between each other on the East Fork, accelerating toward a goal we could Not see. The banks lined with cottonwood & nursed by fallen log, current-riven bone & shell. Theropod footprints in the washes.  Sun, rain, clip of moon. & again.  The world Entire born of explosion. & yours ended Abruptly in the same cacophonies. There are whims Carving out their import, calling for carriage.  We forget we are histories.  ...

  I think of grief, Alma, in rooms Of grief. Quartered. Almost an eruption Of disfigured freedom. There is air To it, a calm to pierce. It is allowed.  & then imagine myself Bloodying my hands to overturn the rubble  Separating us. Quick jagged wall.  Your small bones. Eyes rheumy with plea.  A parent strung to a child’s heart Such that any distance, even those we Can traverse, keens with near panic.  To think of it: you there, flesh & tender & then that sudden tomb, flotsam & shattered architecture. You gone.  A parent’s fingers over concrete, over Glass, dust, rebar twisting like tree branch.  Someone dug for you, Alma. Little Soul, someone tried grief when a bomb Dropped. Someone carved to find You broken & they wept under whistle Of bullet, animal rumble of plane.  In all the wide world there was only That grief & no space for it to root.  I sing your name. Alma. Alma. Alma.  

  The sharp angles of your elbows & rounded knees, rendered In data set. We tell ourselves numbers Rather than names. Iterations Of sameness that practice the cold Clarity of something like inevitability.  A numerical plain resists interruption By dandelion, say, or by shrieking Merlin, crying child, pleas floated Unto updrafts, hopes in sonic blast.  What, Rahima, was your number?  6,547? What was the timbre of your Voice, passing syllable from cheek  To cheek like a ruby, like a candy?  Where were you when your father Loved you in sudden shock & his  Eyes shifted & stayed? There are 535 Members of Congress here, Rahima, & there are zero laws delimiting The scope of your death. It is Permissible, encouraged. My country Spent 23 billion dollars to erase you From yourself. From your father’s arms.  You are yet a human child. I pull Your name from the columns that Engineer our antiseptic distances. I sing it this morning, with love....

  October here the flint & dun Carpeting tundra, nettles dried, Devil’s club hollowed & slumped.  Winter waits but impatiently & we have watched the cranes vee  Southward to the Niobrara, to Mexico.  Flushing south, not bidden, unimpeded.  Maria, you were carried Southwards under mandate. A refuge Where you congregated. Here,  In patchwork of cloud & skein  Of sky, hung catenary between  The twisting spines of ridgelines, The air is saturated with bird. Tern, Swallow, sparrow, chickadee, thrush, Robin. Theirs are the names we  Utter from behind windows. Your  Sky clustered with aircraft. & over your Back, the surging flank of Iron  Sword. It is a paragraph now, Maria, Littered with the titles of despots & tainted men under gilded roofs.  From the rubble, I pull your name & sing it here, under harmony Of birdsong & flapping wing.

  Muslin of the swaddle, cloth Of the diaper, the thin veneer of  A sleeper shirt. The gauze of the  Bandage wrapped around your Head. Blooming the color of desiccated Rose. Tenderest thing. Fine Storm of silk-black hair, finger Nails still soft, booties knitted By an auntie. Shrapnel ripping Through your skull under hail Of quadcopter.  I remember how softly I would place my daughter  In her crib, white noise & owl Song down the creek’s spine. Shiver of cold, snow in swale Against the windowpane, her  Curled mouth comforted in sleep. We tucked her to our chests Under parkas to walk, thirty Below, under canopied starlight,  Under pluming frigid breath.  It was her only avenue to sleep.  Taking her warm & slow from my body To lay her upon her mattress & watching her eyes for proof She yet slept. Her breathing, in, Her breathing, out. Creeping the blanket Up to tiptoe away. Her soft Murmuring of the morning when The clip of sun shru...