Twelve lines

My grandmother wrote me a letter every week, the words leaning so forcefully to

the right, they could have pushed each other off of the stationary and into my lap.

I would rearrange them, imagine secret messages scrambled in her sentences. If you

lay your blood vessels end to end they will circle the earth two times. Her looping

words could be straightened letter by letter, and connected -- a circuit of ink vessels

spanning the United States in search of me, its arteries finding me in all of the places

my mom would start our new lives -- nudist parks, communes, Krishna temples. Like

dirty blood, I could be sucked into my grandmother's veins, returned to her heart for

fresh air. In every letter we drew 3-D cubes, our secret symbol. We would fill our

cubes with love and send them back and forth across the country, a little bit of myself

in each one. Eventually my whole self would be in there, licked and sealed into the

envelope, spinning across the country to meet her inside of twelve lines.

 

 

Winter snakes

I beaded my footprints along the neck
of a winter path today, each oval stamped
with my boots' tread, a handsome zigzag.
The faint ribbon of my breath led me
through acres of tensing tree trunks
holding up the whole white sky,
and threatening its blank eye -
a quiver of arrows, taut in earth's grip.
Around the trees' throats, another
menace: spirals of vine, wrist-thick
and strangling, untangling their fibers
at winter's mild close. They'll uncoil
their rested measure in spring's melt and
descend gravely to the grass as snakes.

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