Two Poems

Lake Country

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My father married
a native. She looks
like clay. Like the land.
She looks
like a history he loves.

*****

You’ve walked well ahead of me on the trail
that ends at the highway, past the inlet
flooded with spring. Next to the creek nailed
to a beech tree is an inscription I always catch
you reading: There is no music like
a little river’s. You don’t know or care
who said this first, but you stare at the lake
like it is the beginning of something.

*****

A fever broke out in late June
after the storm left our yard
treeless. Do you remember?

Our mother still can’t look
at the upturned roots of the elm
tree. She thought its twisted limbs

were magic and something was blown
out of her the night it fell. She looks
like something limp made tight,

a hammock strung among our bodies.

*****

Dry wood splits clean
against a heavy blade. My father
heaves an axe over his shoulder.

I swear his feet leave
the ground for a moment before
he swings the steel head down
to crack the piece of oak.

He flies for me then, and he might be a god.

When I touch the edge
of the axe blade, it is like touching
the tooth of something
that has bitten me before.

*****

Dusk looks like grenadine
in Waushara County.
It’s my mother’s favorite time of day:
See how the lake lies
like hours and hours
of glass?

Loons call from the other side
of the island. She always loved
how they sound almost desperate
for death. She calls back
when she thinks we aren’t listening.
A whispered moan that holds no music.

*****

They say your voice sounds like smoke
or coal, but coal is cold
and you are warm
like wood. Like the space
between fingers. So plump
your wedding band gets stuck.
Your breathing is loud, a train in the night,
but beneath your chin I can still hear
a faint booming. The footfalls
of something migrating.

*****

I want to sleep
but behind the shed a pair
of radios whisper like brothers

and my teeth feel heavy. In the next room,
my mother prays to a God that answers.

I worry for her sometimes, when darkness is a mouth.

In church, she says I like
that the preacher
is a woman and The wine
is always good at this service.

A starling
builds a nest beneath
my window
and I dream my mother’s body
is made of birds:
       her face blackened by crows’ feathers,
       her breasts bound in swallows,
       her legs drowned in swans.

*****

Somewhere, deep in the veins of Lake Country is a fish
with my father’s first wedding ring sitting in its belly.
The gold band and heavy onyx stone drag the fish’s body
to the bottom, his scales chipping off one by one.

The Neighbors

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i.

Every Monday night the summertime cowboy
shaves his head on the back porch

with a hand mirror and a carton of milk,

humming throaty songs my father knows.
His voice sounds like a hitch hiker’s, feathers stuck
in sap. I tie a bandana to the end of a broomstick,
fill it with rotting apples heavy with juice and worms,
sling it over my shoulder just to feel the weight
of it and it feels good—

day-and-night good,
earth-and-water good.
Like I have created something.

The air is heavy and hanging low and smells of sweaty
oak and clipped hairs and the cowboy hums and shaves
until his milk is warm and the trees are black
because they soak up the night and then he leaves
me on the other side of the fence my body fading
back into the tree line.

ii.

My mother calls the summertime cowboy
a lost soul, perhaps because his car is always broken
or because he doesn’t use fabric softener.

At dusk, he rinses dishes with the hose beside his back stoop,
his body some sort of soft machinery between
the slats in our shared fence, bending over the china,
using old, cut-up undershirts as washcloths.

The alley cats roll in later, lapping up the dishwater
in turns while the summertime cowboy drinks
beer I’ve never heard of.
       Sometimes I hear him
beckoning the cats, rubbing his fingers together,
calling them by name.

iii.

Out the window, I watch the summertime cowboy undress.

He takes his shirt off before
he unlaces his boots and places them
next to a dresser that used to be mine

before my parents put it on the curb
one night and, minutes later,
I watched the cowboy hitch it beneath
his arm and walk it back to his place.

iv.

After a snowstorm, I watch the summertime cowboy
shovel his driveway. He is alone and it is a Sunday,
but he wakes with the birds, too cold to sing,

only steam sliding out of their beaks as they sit heavy
and downy atop their children. He wakes to tap
the icicles hanging from his roof which is, my father says,

poorly insulated. By noon, his drive is ground again, shoveled
and salted, sanded for traction. Sitting on his stoop, I see
him take out a thermos and a flask but as he pours

he hides the flask in his jacket before he tilts it to his coffee.
As if he were hiding. As if he were not alone.