Status Updates From Original Fire: Selected and...

Why were we given this unearthly radiance, this blueness,
if not to seek it out, to love it with all our hearts?

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.
I drank, without fear or desire,
this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.
These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.
And I can't tell you yet
how truly I belong
to the hiss and shift of wind,
these slow, variable mouths
through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

Home's the place we head for in our sleep.

Asiniig: Children is going to stay with me

Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
from Advice to Myself

I wake in the blue hours once again,
my whole life spills through me,
as loons pour
the cold green tea of their laughter
across the rose-slabbed lakes of Ontario.
I am one thing. I am nothing you can name.
from The Seven Sleepers.