the ledger of your mistakes and whose breath could peel back bark

exactly as my older sister said when she leapt from the bench

and fled the lessons leaving me behind it didn’t matter

whether I was worthy or unworthy he took me

everywhere in the Chevrolet he played

with flat fingers I do too

GEESE

there is no cure for temperament it’s how

we recognize ourselves but sometimes within it

a narrowing imprisons or is opened such as when my mother

in her last illness snarled and spat and how this lifted my dour father

into a patient tenderness thereby astounding everyone

but mostly it hardens who we always were

if you’ve been let’s say a glass-half-empty kind of girl

you wake to the chorus of geese overhead

forlorn for something has softened their nasal voices

their ugly aggression on the ground they’re worse than chickens

but flying one leader falling back another moving up to pierce the wind

no one in charge or every one in charge in flight each limited goose

adjusts its part in the cluster just under the clouds

do they mean together to duplicate the cloud

like the pelicans on the pond rearranging their shadows

to fool the fish another collective that constantly recalibrates but fish

don’t need to reinvent themselves the way geese do

when they negotiate the sky

on the fixed

unyielding ground there is no end to hierarchy

the flock the pack the family you know it’s true if you’re

a take-charge kind of girl I recommend

houseplants in the windows facing south

the cacti the cyclamen are blooming on the brink

of winter all it took was a little enforced deprivation

a little premature and structured dark

BIRCH

before it’s too late I need to study the great religions time

is speeding up in the bad movie of my life months fly off

the calendar or the camera stays fixed on one tree

in leaf no leaves in leaf sunrise sunset

as the great Yiddish musical says

and then the chuppah the goblet smashed delirious dancers

parading the newlyweds in chairs like royalty but why

give up those beasts whose hooves leave valentines

for us in the muddy sty and why so much anxiety

regarding women ditto Mary’s

beatific smile but I like distinctive hats on those in charge

and I know I need a little intercession spilt salt

flung over the shoulder a daily lineup facing east

though some of us have to pray in our personal tents

like snails

a wedding in a garden

suits me fine the flowers left unsacrificed

it’s Adam and Eve except that Adam had no mother

no one who worried about that missing rib now incarnate

wearing white like a young birch beside my boy who’s grown

bewitched looking nowhere but at her I know that look

a Druid with his chosen tree he might as well