ADVENT DAY NINETEEN: MICHELLE DETORIE!

HEARTSLEIGHT

Whose bells chatter in the pine needles that never sing

of winter, never glitter in the shag-shuffed ice of shivers:

those long ago seasons that crawled from polar reaches

and touched our skins and glinting shelters -- tools

rising to meet sunmelt. We put on our boots and coats.

At first

all was mudmelt, mudheart. A half-moon nursing

the hare-cubs, the wolf-girls.

But then a starched acceleration

of haunted winds, hot with our own hunger

blossomed along ravines:

ravenous sucking rivers full

of so many days, so many skins.

Sinews invisibly thick with every death --

exhausted, expressed.

What resurrection we’ve called forth!

Our own fat beasts full of animate wailing!

They are so like us -- the way we are, were --

slithering: shocked by fear, desire, starlight --

                    heartbreak, heartsleight.

But today, now, I am so tired.

                             I want to look away.

Tell me

that it’s going to be okay. That it already happened.

That it’s over. That we’re in heaven.

And then

let’s have a picnic. Let’s mark those moments

when the trees touch the clouds, when the grass

hums the sweet green song that thrums our bones

to blooming.

& after

let’s watch the constellations of kindness -- our familiars --

come softly out to bless us, safe and sound

                                          and blissfully stupid, 

                           all wrapped up in

this blue and beautiful house.

MICHELLE DETORIE is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, and time-based poetry. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, is just out with Ahsahta Press.