Gail Martin

My liturgy is easy: morning’s first bird,

warm rain, the peepers’ glee. The east sky

lighting up. But still, there will be a fork

in my day, some junction of blessing

and question. Call the hawk wheeling

over the plowed field abundance,

casting a shadow as he flies. This

is not a simple economy, where loss

is the only bird at the feeder. Consider

one world—white tulips in a crystal jar,

Japanese pearl divers, skirts flaring

in the light then becoming the light.

A girl who confesses the reason she loves

elephants is because they mourn their dead.

We used to have a minister who moved

his hands to contain or punctuate.

On the one hand … and on the other …

this scaffolding a formula to say almost

nothing. Yesterday, I found deer bones, gore

gone but some fur clutched to a joint

that looked gnawed off. It takes me a while,

studying its size, the limits of its hingey nature

to determine knee. And suddenly I miss

my brother who understands all these things,

as well as the helplessness of it, the torn

full skirt of it, the spilled cold milk of it.

When I found it, I couldn’t tell if it was animal

or human, shining there in the cold corner

on the wet floor, not pulsing, not steaming, no

electrical charge. Larger than two fists, a wet mop

head, a ham. Not an overweight plum or bunch

of grapes left too long, halo of fruit flies hovering.

I am telling you what it looked like, what it made

me think: cows, bovine. A bull’s spleen, a bull frog

crouching. That kind of weight. Or a kind of bomb,

the way childbirth is a bomb, the purple wetness, why

you’d never wear your own nightgown, why you’d rip

a nightgown off. It looked like Jesus’ heart, purpled

and taxed. I can see it stuck on top of my Christmas

tree. I can see it as a pair of wet socks swollen and balled.

Last winter I couldn’t touch my car without throwing off

sparks. I grew afraid to reach for the door handle, to adjust

my mirror. I wore rubber boots and gloves, tried to be sure

I was grounded. The day I found the heart I met a man

who told me he’d experienced the same thing. He felt

the same fear, the same shame. I was the first one he told.

My father was a surgeon and my mother was a sandhill crane. Or my mother delivered babies and my father was a starfish. There were two of them. My father fed my mother peanut butter and raisin bran every morning. Friday nights we’d play two truths and a lie over and over and I learned love’s habits. Grown men held golf umbrellas over us, sensible harbors from raindrops or bee swarm, fed me peppermints warm from their pockets. Sometimes it would storm paper and the trees would flatten and turn white. Two nights ago, the bark peeled from our last living birch tree. One of us has a scar on the throat that still itches. It may be a paper cut. The family engine never sputters, though my brother has never been happy. All his yachts are leakers. My own diamond shoes are too tight, and then there is my closed heart. The rattlesnake curled on the threshold? We toss him on the woodpile near the cedars to keep down mice, their rustle and scurry on the heap. Mother dreamed she heard them playing thimbles in the eaves. Even now, I monitor the calcium and gold levels in her blood, its sweet smell and gush. And this year, for the first time, I howl as the white flowers go into the dirt, their frowsy skirts spilling over the clay pot’s lip. The landscape is cramped here, no mountains stretch their faces to cloud, no water spills its trout off the world’s edge. House house house house. Tree tree tree, you can’t see much at all.