Stray II

I feed the cat we later call Mama Kitty, peering scared,
stripey through the glass door. I cannot teach her

about roofs. No one passed down to her the myth of sofas.
Only petrichor of coming rain to shoo her to undergrowth.

My children fill her water bowl, whisper no one will
hurt you. Stepping to my kitchen faucet once day, a peregrine

falcon suddenly arose from grass just below the window up past
my glass and to the neighbor’s roof—feather gasp.

Dogs bark midnight, and I enumerate in my head all possible
havens below forsythia, gas grill, neighbor’s toolshed.

Swelling belly feeds bravery, duty urging her to risk
spring kittens to our same feeding hands at dawn and dusk.

She stands watch, alert, looks me in the eye, and I want to
tell her she can lie down, that our doorstep is safe. Four kittens,

become three, then two. Then autumn. I cannot teach them about
laps and winding figure-eights between calves, the way I taught

my children that to be wrapped in each other is to be
alive. Thunder wakes me, and I imagine shuddering

shrub branches, rivulets flooding thatch. I suspect
she recognizes coyote howls, lawnmowers, the swift loft

of owls, the persuasion of hunger. She perches at attention while
new autumn kittens eat, while I pet one who allows.

I want to teach them the furnace, and sunbeams through window
glass to rug. Checking my door locks, spreading a quilt over

my sleeping child, I think of fur curled on fur in some moonless
crook assailed by air. I want to teach them about drywall,

about hours-long fat sleep—unshivering, no nearby rustling,
snapping twigs. Each snowfall reveals death like dusting

for fingerprints. Wide wing imprints at the ends of tiny
footprint trails. It’s a wonder any of us survive to another spring.

Marrow

There are those
whose marrow

hungers for
shows of force—

the way a barber shop pole
spiral recalls

its history of blood-letting.
The way the hawk perched on

a bare branch with
a songbird in its

talons, releases
beak-plucked feathers

to the wind a yard
above a hollow wound

in the trunk where
two squirrels

had been coming
and going

but now stay put.
The trick is to stay alert to it.

There are those who lie
perpetually in wait.

Whether their ambush
is imagined or actual, regardless

it is an instinct they shelter—
skeletal—the seeping fount

teeming red red
deep in the black inside

their bones. The trick is
to anticipate a burst.

At Forty-Four

I am still unsure whether menses
is a menace magical or madness.

I close my body—no
my thighs do still angle wide like the bow of a rowboat

but drydocked, landlocked,
burden boards parched, splintering with ache for lake.

My body knows to open on command meets
demand like the freezer

light that lights when its hinge switch
is tripped. But I can’t admit

what I want, can’t make my skin fit
me like a Lady of the Bedchamber tugging corset

laces, foot leveraged on my ass. I forbid
myself permission—that persimmon which

would whisper sweet sweet sweet to lips and teeth.
The meat of me vacuum-sealed

in translucent plastic, shoe-boxed on a basement
shelf. There is milk in me somewhere still. I know it.