Meltwater

IN A LAND WHERE EVERYTHING IS TRYING TO KILL ME, I CONSIDER LETTING IT

All I would need to do is stand for too long

beneath its jagged, capable shadow.

All I would have to do is let my skin absorb

that shade until my blood runs at 94 degrees.

Hypothermia is so much warmer than

I thought. The confusion begins here,

the mingling. Every time I walk beneath a tree,

more of me tangles with the breeze that lifts

its leaves, which are always 70 degrees, regardless

of geography. It would be so easy, listening

to this flash inside my brain, this fact

that takes up no more space than the open mouth

of a stoma. 50 microns. Half the width

of a neuron. It would be so easy, the sharpened

blade sliding like wind through whatever

comes within range. I snap my mind away

like a sleeve from an open flame, but the thought

will finish what it started. It will home

like salmon, or whales tracing the aura

of a continent. Like a missile. The wire

has been tripped, the fluids in my ear have risen

into waves by the alarm. How long

have I been standing here. Who is the woman

lying in the shade.

***

M

M is for murmur and mutter—the ambiguity of the mobius strip, the marsh, the maybe trembling between two membranes. M is for mother, dark matter, the matrix that cradles the muscadine, marble, monosyllable, moon. Be menagerie, multivocal, madrigal. I carry your multitudes through midsummer, through marigolds and mayapples, through mud. I hide you in the middle of a maze, bury you like minerals in the mine of my body. You are marrow-deep, marine, mollusk in your mother of pearl hull. The months are a moat between you and melancholy, missiles, mourning. M is for the meteor magnifying through the telescope’s lens, the metronome unmuffling. M is for metamorphosis and mutant. I am more and more mountainous. I am a mare rolling in a midnight meadow, all musk and muzzle. M is for the migrations of monarchs, mule deer, mullet, for magnetic fields, for the way the world pulls you from me and you materialize. You are motor turned music, machine turned mortal. I am mended and marooned somewhere between mist and milk. I molt, am mangled. I molt, am myself.

***

THE FUTURE

The body is lined with it, like a nest,

like the down the eider plucks from her breast

until her nest is a gray mist weighed down

by five sea-green eggs. At the end of each season,

only one duckling will survive to fly

away. This is an average. On any given day,

all of the eggs may hatch, all of the hatchlings

may freeze. The gulls may cruise in rings

above the nesting colonies, the polar bear

may not surge ashore. The female eider

can lay eggs for eighteen years, more or less.

Without wanting to, I do the math. She will lose

seventy-two chicks before she dies, those numbers

traded against her own long years by nature’s

calm calculus. There is only so much life

to go around. It isn’t like a flame, whose belief

in itself is enough to burn a forest down.

Instead, we have been given one

bolt of cloth to be shared. The choice is

in how you shear it. I say “choice”

but of course it’s not. It’s a vast, organic machine

running like static behind everything; the gene

doesn’t want anything, doesn’t want, doesn’t

exist except by cosmic mistake. Accident

means to move toward a fall. And so they fall

and fall through time, carelessly, like a carnival

ride whose switch is stuck in the “on” position.

I would like to die before losing any children.

In fact, there is no reason for me to be alive anymore.

Having borne my code into the future,

even if only by another lifetime, I could not matter

less. Eider ducklings enter the water

motherless, will dive for mussels on their own

just one day after hatching. If they escape starvation,

the gulls, the cold, when will the dying begin?

When do the cells start to multiply or weaken?

The eider’s scientific name is somateria mollisima:

the softest body. My own is already less terra firma

and more open water, more unmooring, more

losing. I may have already begun to rupture

invisibly, my cells may have already begun

their unwinding. Time picks us up then sets us down

a little further on, pulses through us like a wave.

Sometimes it seems as if the eggs survive

just to keep the nest from blowing away.

I have stayed, even though it makes me prey

to worse things than freezing wind or gulls.

I am mostly glad we are not wild animals.

I am mostly glad about most things, even

the future, even though I know that broken

shells may float on its waters. I need to think

that the eider doesn’t grieve the breaking.

***

XYZ

The year yellows. The yolk of yesterday’s sun lazes in the yard, piled beside the yew and yarrow, the zucchini vine that never flowered, the waxy zenobia. It sprawls like yarn, a yawn that won’t be swallowed back into summer’s mouth. I am zombie-eyed, zephyr-minded, would sleep until the next equinox if I could, would relax my heart until it stopped. The cold rises through the thorax and into the larynx. The autumn haze is heavy and thick as a smashed yam. Through it, pollen floats like yeast. It is hard to follow the wren’s pitch and yaw, its yammering. Yearling, heir of my X, you are full of the reflex to live. I am hexed, cannot be coaxed to thrive. Zygote means yoke, the zipping of two bodies together, the axes on which are plotted a galaxy of Xs and Ys. Somewhere in that matrix is your syntax of chromosomes. You are a black box, a maze of invisible zigzags, beyond exegesis. The toadflax freezes from radix to apex. The ilex is evergreen but untouchable, the fuzz of some animal transfixed in its thorns. I think about extinction, the unidirectional vortex of time, read all the obsolete entries of the dictionary: the codex ywrit in lampe blacke; the yale ykoweryn by phlox up to its helixed horns; whelps ydreynt; the mouse in grasse by the fox ylaid; the phoenix from its sooty nest yborn ad infitium. I don’t care for eternity, its violence boxed and distributed into months. I don’t care for the zodiac, twisting back on itself like a zero. It only reminds me that your star is not fixed, that no stars are, that all measurements—azimuth to zenith—measure only emptiness. Even the sphinx knew that time is the most vexing puzzle. I envy the zebra distributing its name endlessly among the zebrafish, the zebra mussel, the zebra finch. Back in the garden, the drizzle glazes into ice. A bronzed apple thuds, a broken yo-yo. I cannot say no. I allow myself to be yanked back up, exhausted. Seized by the topaz sky and the breeze through it. By yes, by you.