Molly Damm
WORKING ALONE
Celeste writes about ne-pen-thes and I misread “A drug
mentioned by Homer
that lets one forget sorrow,” which startles but I always think: snow.
One winter in the Blue Ridge, my torso laced
between a farmer’s thighs, warm twisting sheets
by the morning flooded
with cold, the stove long-dead.
To be hewn from a thing as vulnerable
as his animals then, huddling, coats dry and sparked
with frost. I wanted to be him, working alone. I wanted
to declare it a bad year
as I sat up in his bed and measured
that it did not belong to me,
everything I observed.
I came to the mountains
to be re-introduced to the other
deaths, the variations: early indigo
morning, its faith
in lingering darkness,
what came according to the coldest
dream in which one can live.
Darkness? Just the need
to hide our own.
Walking Home: Map and Compass
I keep coming back to this bond
with the declination of the body.
It changes as I walk:
difference between true and magnetic.
Difference between a cavity
and the blast of dust which fills it.
What startles most in you is the roaring in of deep weather. The way
I am balmed by it: bent day, captive day, bright cusp.
From out here, I can’t hear your wife murmuring her scripture,
or wince as she gently clinks her ring against the table.
All I see are knots, favorites as ones that attach separate cords
together,
tresse, or call it zeppelin bend. Talisman of your birth,
blood going bitumen despite us.
I think of everything but you as cheap-fired
and roughshod. Whatever can be riven, riven.
Your clear voice husbanding her
from the cease and burn.
It’s nothing you can promise between bullet and pill.
Except when I learn you are gone,
you’re already curled and
ended inside me, and I made my own way like that
but never supported it.
Maybe I love you more for coming up
so much as ricochet and giving me a thing to hold, or
a tiny thing to ask after
in this separation by fire.