Harbinger-of-Spring

          Erigenia bulbosa
whose fruit sometimes arrives
          before the leaves have fully opened

And because the half-light of winter seems to fit
          the bled-dry look of the place, the white petals
unfurl in a whisper: incredible as the days
          stretch longer—Or was it
impossible: the way the sticky colostrum turned
          pearly, into beads of milk on my nipple that one spring
while my new baby lay under a plastic dome, still
          struggling to lick oxygen from the air outside?
The suede underbrush is as good a place
          as any to announce a new season.

And because I want to see in a flower
          myself, I think
the harbinger’s February to April bloom must suggest a distaste
          for the copper blaze of summer when
pollinators get greedy, desperate. That she turns away as I have:
            It begs the question of, year after year, how
one can bear to open such soft parts
          —petal, anther, stem, leaf—
her (though I know she isn’t) completeness:

Language Attrition, or A doe, a recent killing

            After “Traveling through the Dark” by William Stafford

I.
If I erased the name of your home would your feet lift
from Earth
            sweeping from pacific miracle mile to calcium-lined hammock of unmarked grave

Would you find our roots intertwined in language
of conqueror
            pausing paternal in dark sweep of roadway  

What of metallic mountain crest eating sunray
like breath
            devouring language of beast and mother

Do you mourn for the desert land named border, deemed
not home
            demarcating earth and dictionary

Do you think hard for the canyons that open in the sigh
of twilight to welcome soft marrow without question?

II.
I shovel
            in wild search of bedsoil
            longing for the ditch
            I lay in before

I wondered
            what this world would make
            of a baby boy now old
            enough to call me bitch
            and to later apologize

I long
            for the women who never
            started the long climb
            upward
            while ankles swelled
            resisting, telling
            stop     stop     stop

III.
What language did our mothers speak before imperialism
crowned their wild tongues with dictates
of birth, language, death?

Could I wipe the name from the hospitals
to resurrect the languages deemed
alive, still, never to be born

Five generations of my mothers moved and removed,
never naming our hospitals:               So let me ask,
                        Who thought               hard for us all?

BLESSED IS THE FRUIT OF THY WOMB

how I became human—
how I tried not to. Hail,
Mary               blessed

No prayers telling
of missed menstruation
or panic

Art thou among women?
chosen for your woman form
stripped with every

Holy,               Mother—
venerable and servile—
I bled.

For ten days birth seeped from me.
I’d never howled with such
conviction       as when crowning

life tore from inside me.
            You were chosen,
Full of      grace          when faced

announcement not question—
the lord is with thee
repeat along the well-worn beads

what lies between the virgin
prayers            is skin-to-
skin     sex made flesh

Finger over belly’s stretched,
silvered lines               scar tissue
            How human

you must have been
before they made you
porcelain         image (mirage)—

On Christmas Eve, I listened
sleep drool hot on shoulder)
to the bishop give

pretty image
of painless birth—didn’t
linger on the ripe womb

remembered the afternoon
arms full with screaming
baby                I’d wailed

into a corner
and wondered,
did you bleed, too?