2012: Humming Along

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is go where they can find you.”
— Winnie the Pooh

January Morning, Her Quilt

She sleeps
in a row of stitches,
a prick of blood
dried to stain.

I wake
in this flash of magenta throats,
hummingbirds sipping
at the window, frost
webbing the feeder.

She is the quilt, I am
the body warmed.

We were one mind once,
not dust, more a soft oozing,
she and I, you too. Sometimes
the earth is so hot and liquid
it comes alive.

Don’t call it a beginning, call it
muddy palm, little zephyr, invisible pulse
of light, call it nothing
but more than nothing.

Who knew there’d be wings,
tongues, shimmering skins,
fingers swimming cotton
with a needle?

No, don’t call it
anything. She is before words,
under poems, she is this mouth
happy to be a cave of echoes.

Think humming.

Who knew the song
in her throat is the same, listen,
as this cord of feathers
blurred in flight?

I remember "aw," then "damn it,"
the tiny puncture, her blood
wicked loose, spreading open
as a rose into the fabric.

It wasn’t
the pain that made her mad,
it was the ruin.