Ali's Poetry

Prairie romance

September 19th, 2023

I bookend the summer with dreams, when I wake
it is fall, the beating heart of it. You have two hands
on the wheel, a long highway, praise songs
on the radio. Coming dark draws back from headlights: a wave
sucked back to sea.

Not far off four crosses in a field embraced by a tiny fence, a plot
staked by four sister-ghosts. Measles, or smallpox. They died all in one day.
They sleep deep, near where the overpass curves like a smile, where some boys in a truck smashed themselves to death one night
Moth wings beating to an open flame, flames gilding the moment of departure,

one such place of departure a fifth marked white cross,
near where the bird hung dead by its feet
from a charred branch. I saw it one day last summer, walking the fields to you,
lightning-struck; recoiled from its flipped gaze, its forever final view of earth.

Many things die. I wonder why we shouldn’t be some of them.
The twisting of a song, the musty cab
of a fast-tracked pickup. Fall nights round here, there is
always smoke from an outdoor fire. Always the kiss of a cigarette
drawn into your lungs, the glory of leaves on fire. Overhead the scorch of stars.

Many things burn. I wonder why I
shouldn’t be one of them.
The short and brutal life of chickens

May 13th, 2023

The short and brutal life of chickens
Come the fox’s jaws, raccoon,
Even weasel, maybe.
Word is there is one around, been spotted sneaking, arriving
after dark, leaving
like a ghost

The legacy of feathers
Drifts and clumps,
bits of sunlit gristle, trailing
from the ravaged coop down the grassy backyard
to the trees, where the predators emerge and return
Emerge and return.

The last terrified moments.
If one is taken only,
and two or three are left, how
do the left-behind wait out their days remaining?
What survivor guilt,
what privilege of another day under the sun,
what shivers of impending doom?
They rustle, restless, on their perches
Shifting weight from foot to chicken foot, the night long.

My mother went out
Determined each time, after each dramatic end,
to reinforce the walls and keep the predators at bay.
To try to frustrate their attacks from below,
from above, from the trees and the dirt
and the sky.
To stop them from taking the chickens her granddaughters named.

But after the penultimate chicken was snatched
she sent her final hen away, a refugee
to a foreign coop.

She didn’t have the heart to keep chickens any longer.

The coop is empty now.
The home of vines, wildflowers, peeling paint.
The odd downy feather clings, moving a little in the breeze.
As if alive.
Mal au coeur

April 23rd, 2023

I got sick at heart
in the early fall.
Spark of essence. Scud of cloud

unsettles the moon. City backyard.
Raccoons came by,
little supplicant, with the dark masked eyes.

In the soil, nothing stirs or starts.

The nurse smiled at my tattoo, making
conversation, as she must.
Did it hurt much, were you very young?

A hummingbird is like us, borne of ova
curled and yoked. The tiny mother.

Hold your anemone head, little creature,
wavering lightly, open mouth
searches against my shoulder.

But my head hit the pillow
Hard. Spent with relief.

I won’t forget
you slipped homeless as a cloud.
Formless, with perfect-formed heart
The way you slipped.
A Tree Aflame in Morning Sun

March 30th, 2023

I am not my work

It is what I was given to do

I am not my home

It is what I was given to tend

I am not my children
They are what I was given to cherish

What I am is that tree
burnished by rising sun
toes deep in the rooted earth
fingertips held up and open
to the mystery of the sky.

Crown gilded by light.

Crown touching the light
and sky, the earth below.
The mystery of it, the power of it, the truth
of it is, I am

That easily turned to flame.
poets always write about spring

March 25th, 2023

In a northern place,
don’t welcome spring with open arms.

She approaches sideways.
Like a cat, don’t look at her directly
you’ll only disturb her, she’s only
a shadow in the evening
light lingering longer
on frozen lakes
She’s only footprints dissolving
where the deep snow loosens to mush
she’s the cry lonely
of geese – not the great V’s honking
overhead, like last October, just two or three together

The shroud of snow still heavy
heavy on the river path.

Remember the spring when you died
I walked in dreams past open doors
sat down in wooden pews where rivers
ran past, furious meltwater

In empty space, still I knew
to glance again, aslant
to see you’d entered sideways
softly, on cat’s feet
from the corner of my eye, if I did not turn my head

the shroud might lift, I might

Glimpse the coming glory.
The Widower

March 17th, 2023

Could you change these heavy ones for hollow bones?
You wonder at night when the
wolves come. You would bash out the marrows from the tibula and fibula, lay
the rich femur open for the licking.
Wrap handfuls of sagging sinew,
dig for withered muscles of calves
how you once dug clams from the damp salt sand.

Then knead, you would pummel back to bread-dough elastic,
you would crouch,
and flex, you would spring. Leaping out and up spreadeagled,
a throwing star, or a frail-spined cartwheel,
spun across the face of the fleshless moon.

Where do we truly go when we die?
Here lies the puff-disturbed exoskeleton, long abandoned by the cunning spider.
Shin bones delicate as eyelashes
collapse in on themselves.

You say scraping enough to keep body
and soul together is more than you’re worth.
Being gnawed through nightly. Daily bitten at, pawed
over, as so many odds and ends
left behind, an old lady’s estate sale. Her empty blouses
flowered, slack-shouldered; the concave yawn of patent leather;
handfuls of lavender crumbled in pouches.
China boxes, the ones where she kept
the children’s baby teeth
painted pink, and blue and springtime green.

In the end, that’s all that remains.

You

memories of skin

what’s left aimed skyward, shedding

Teeth, and bones like jet trails.
renewal

March 1st, 2023

dirty bitch stupid needy ugly whore c*nt

Can you be washed clean in the forest
Let pine needles brush sick
words from your skin.
Let leaf-specked pools
of standing water soak you,

hide you from that gaze. Walk
and you will be made new in her image.

A mountain on seeing you will bow his head
A running river stop

And if a fox pauses on its path, or a sparrow
should alight on a branch beside you

she will speak
aloud, say your name aloud.

This is you.

This was always you.
DSM-V

February 25th, 2023

I.

Dark wolves gather
at the edge of the trees.

Dark horses bolt
black against the sky

Along the ridge, growls
in the thunder-charged air.

Eat you alive. We will
Eat you alive.

II.

Coiling, uncoiling, the serpent
wakes in her grassy hollow.

Tastes lightning with her flickering tongue.
Flashes, root to the tip of
the brainstem.

III.

Fight, but you don’t have breath to speak, can’t swallow
raindrops, or berries warm from the garden sun.
You bow your head, press knees
to the tilting earth.

Snails, or hiding toads crouched in the soil,
praying protection from the rhubarb leaf shadow.

IV.

There’s no getting hold of myself
Times like these. No taking in hand.

No bootstraps pulled,
No limb cut bloodied
from serrated edge to freedom.

V.

Here at the edge of the world,
Long ago buffalo plumbed the depths of the sky.
Frantic caught between the snapping
pursuit, and the wild space.

Made to jump, they jumped. Dark shapes that
fall among wolf willow, among sage

Hooves beating the thunder-charged air.
In the Night we dream of Day

February 16th, 2023

The prowl of cop cars disturbs our slumber

The howl of horns in the freezing city

where your hands and feet move in time to the
beating drum.

Blessed be the sage smoke
curled in cement air.

And out on the land

Red dresses hang from trees
The groan of the earth bearing the weight
of pipe on its back, broke open
like a shell. Taste the rancid

heart.

Don’t you chase us with ancestors
and their old speech, don’t you dance and turn and
pin us up against a wall.

When from such dreams we still try to retreat.

Like the animals deeper
into disappearing forest.

Like icebergs calving into shrinking
islands, like a breath exhaled

into a dark and crowded sky.
Canadian Shield, Spring

February 14th, 2023

Heard a whippoorwill, out walking this morning
A morning like one at the beginning of the world
(only it’s the end of the world now, more likely)
Or maybe not a whippoorwill, I don’t know most birds.
I know I did see a flash of black and red on a bulrush
(or maybe a cattail, I don’t know most plants)

But I know this pond, and the redwing blackbird,
I know the melt of snow, the ice pocked and heaving,
river water awakened and running beyond.
I know these two geese, mates returned, watching,
riding the waves – and though I don’t see him,
the beaver, I see the tree stumps he’s shaped
sharpened like javelins, pointed like spears

I see the flint cheekbones of the earth
emerged from snow into sun, her soft breasts of moss,
Her skin of pine needles, her brown grass greening,
in spots still wet, concealing fragrant mud.

A morning like one at the beginning of the world

The dawn shaking out like a blanket around us

I put my lips to the earth, I stretch myself full on her
Smoothed rocks, withered grass, smell of wet leaves in shade
I stretch my arms along her ridged bones, calling
down the sun, calling up the warmth,
Conducting her warmth and his, the sun’s, through me,
into my bones, heart to beating heart.

And palm to upturned palm

I forgive her. I forgive us both for who we were
all winter.