Before Migration
Along the street I watched
them burn plastics.
Farms, often as not,
stretching back throats
to the mountain.
Surely the smoke will
gag me, sleep me,
blur thought of these
three-legged dogs,
these oxen pale sea-things
deprived of despair
and dream, sucked into lungs
of the unyielding.
I jog past, stranger,
wake with another’s face.
Profile of mountain,
cough up blue dust.
One-sided Moss
Hunted, these trees draw their arms together
to hide me, I who am old enough
to inhabit the invisible,
to slip through a hole in one trunk and emerge
on the other side of some strange world.
These roots rouse silver in me,
chest pulsing as I outrun memory, lapse
on the border of beginning.
This owl here has known me a time or two.
I have never gone back
on the language I promised.
Never bared newborn teeth
stripped from a hulk and splayed on a string,
left my body behind to swing
from a branch this side of dawn,
thigh-high fungi threading me through.
