& wolf spit, I sang torch songs, I was carried up into the trees by waves.

The moon knew me. It took my side. Duh, I thought & I gave you the finger.

One day, I woke up such a force, I watched your name fall

right out of the language. Did you feel that?

How you are now girl dust? Shipwreck? Bone muck? Ghost?

It’s only in another life that I could be damned

back to hell for your half-look, that I was

ever your jilted bride, sweating it out

Aqua-Netted in a farm field down by the interstate

under a goddamn willow bower, eye-deep

in a rabble of no-account drunks.

You once thought to make me afraid, to consider

what that might do to me. I think now:

how unimaginative. To kill a tree, any asshole

can hammer a ring of nails into the trunk.

Already, you don’t know me & one day

I will be even stranger, one day I just may fall

to my knees in church to say Reverend, my God, what

were Eve’s other choices & I trust you will not

be there as my witness. I admit I once believed

I could be anything, & didn’t you say to me then “That’s true

for some people”—? When I was 7, a boy slapped me

& I was punished for “inciting violence.”

So it began: when I bled, I thought I deserved it.

I wanted one brightly colored warship; I wanted

a grief with my name printed right there on it.

To have & to hold—there is, after all, a difference.

Before anyone fucked with her, Eurydice was just a woman walking alone

through a field of snakes. It’s late now, much

too late to hold us back——you know that——

pay attention this time when the hiss of our names

ribbons off, white flame against the dark.

CLEF

At night the wind

over empty farmland

sounds like water

rolling up at me

out of blackness—

dulling the blade,

icing the plaits

of frozen grain. Once

I could sing whole arias

alone to a crowded theater

as if my own voice

could return me

to myself. I think

I was listening.

I think the white glare

of the light

is always unnerving.

When winter drops,

I see my hand

in it. A metaled fist.

My fingers fall

over pitch pine, yew

needle, furrowed bark.

So I’m sustained.

So I know all the words

for that. I belong to

a system of cleaving.

These are my papers.

See how I was a bell

clanging all night

through the broken fields?

How I spoke only in code?

I know what to do

with the dark.

Why don’t you stare

through the glass.

You can witness

my rust voice, my salt

mouth. Raking up

every syllable

like sea-glass. C-sharp

is a signal. I will spell it all out.

BRUTE FORCE

I tried everything once. It was the brute force method.