I thought "humps" because we are both vagabonds, historically speaking. Born with wandering eyes, something in me still shifting still as this little girl named home kicks my side.
Humps, a way of storing up for long journeys. Edith Piaf in the background. Another vagabond. What it means to be between; me between country and city. A little toadstool called home gnawing at you. Collecting mushrooms, carrying them on our backs.
Remember the small animal in my belly? I thought about that when I was pregnant, like it was foresight...
I'm listening. You said she was swimming in the air, remembering her animal self inside you. This weekend in the woods, speaking of animals in us, I was surprised to come again upon a dead goat in a stone shelter.
Oh, who dragged him there...and again? You were encountering said animal for the second time?
Do you remember ten years ago when we talked about the small animal inside us too?
It wasn't a real goat this time. It was as if real in the woods of the city. A way of feeling intensely. Your animal laughing. I had forgotten, but I remember your stomach folded beautifully in three. Do you remember that drawing?
I do...and this is the first apartment in ten years where I haven't hung the gold leaf five directions drawing. I remembered you seeing and saying don't hang that, I'll give you something better. But I kept hanging it. This time I thought, well, maybe this is a new chapter.
Is there a real goat in here at all? Or are we all metaphor?
I'll give you a real new drawing. Not of a goat. The goat was real. I feel keyed in lately to what life and death mean. I'm thinking, too, of the 'soft animal of your body' in the Mary Oliver poem. What do you think of that poem? It has the desert in it and walking on knees. Camels and their difficulty, it seems, getting up and down...
It's on the fridge five feet from you right now. I thought it would be good for the man in the house. I like poems like that these days, ones with flour and lamps and nutrients, poems that make things and do things for us.
There's a drawing that E. Bishop did of a ceiling lamp that I really like. It's the perfect color, and its lines like a spider crawling in shadows.
It's been so long since we made that journey to New York from Colorado.

the animal sleeps

she does, perfectly. She likes to feel accompanied for the transition. Did I become the animal in my belly? Did I give birth to her? Is she taming? I think she is stretching out and growling of late.

The Bishop painting of the master house was beside the bed of the lover before the last lover. It's lines were thicker than what was between us which was not quite enough. It's colors like pinkish skin. I was too hungry for him.
I remember waking the lover before the last lover to show him the Bishop picture of the lamp, and him saying, You woke me up to show me that? I don't know that I was too hungry, but I was too hurt. I feel like I'm just beginning to stretch out and growl and unlearn that hurt.

Follow your tracks and draw a map of that unlearning. If only we could do that, take a breath and walk the trail that brings us back to ourselves. I am not opposed to well being anymore. To being well. Just that.

The ones that had skin that smelled like mine turned away from me. He did that in a what do they say...fell swoop? Fail swoop? No growing tired. Just a big fell swoop.

Draw a map, you say, to what we're no longer opposed to. A way of existing that doesn't constantly pain. The map would be light green, the color of just leafing maples, the color of my lover's eyes, the color of something unripe, yet so firm, so strong. There would be numbers, 7, 8. Names: Lathe, Kythia. There would be wrong turns that lead to the right end.

The color of the cool swivel cuplike chairs at the Milk Station in my dream. Laithe. I think it needs an I. The scent of old leather outside, burning wood, movie popcorn.

I did go to that reading last week, the one I found out about half an hour before it began. The small animal rode on my front. We got there over an hour late, just in time for Eileen. She heard the sound of many people clapping their hands together for the first time, looked up as if in a storm.

And yesterday in the car, I put fresh lilac under her nose. She sneezed a little, and smiled.

Lilac. My mom would give me some sprigs to give to my teacher each spring. Your animal's good pee-popcorn smell. The poet I was talking about, Stonecipher, knows of a color: golden ginkgo. The sun outside. Your glass of white. How I needed to document the interior of love as an Oak Street apartment, yesterday putting up the wallet-sized photos on my lover's closet door. A doubled interior. Like the animals inside us.

I like that it was wallet sized, the things we carry. "white wine eases the mind along the trail of the faithful body once..." something like that. from olga. lots of o, the grate painting by his ex that sits over the table where we eat, draining, draining.

It is a mediocre painting at best. There's the rub.

ooh child

Angel from Montgomery, visiting you in Poughkeepsie, the fall being what I remembered New England falls to be, filled with a smell of soccer balls, the light just so slanted. We strong women. Writing. Writhing. Laithe. Letting the draining go. Deciding to put the symbols places where they can grow, rather than deform. Lining up. I'm lining, finding the spider light, finding that I want to --

the lining we shed each month becomes a home.