Entropy

If you walk just far enough off the track,
through the mallee scrub, the sugarwood,
through all of the
severe branches, over the driest
of earths, crunching stone and scat
under foot, you will find
the bones
resting
under the smoldering eye of the sun.
Not small bones,
not fresh.

I sit close enough to see the white
adorning the ground like jewelry, and wonder
how and why and
when the bones first fell.

Instinct tells me not to go
where the big predators go,
but here, in the southern desert heat,
it is the cat, the
fox, the wedge-tail eagle, and man
that draws the most blood.

When so many years have passed and
we are gone, not
only from this land but from this life,
and the feathers fall like cotton, blown
in the wind, and
the flesh of everything roots in the belly of
another,
will only the bones remain of some wiser and
more simple
existence?

In my own skin, the bones ache.
For the earth—for a
resting place, for the bleached skin of the
sun to strip away everything and
expose me
from the inside out.

I wonder where they will end up,
here,
or in American soil,
burned in a forest fire in 2052,
ground to a fine powder or thrown,
with a heavy bag of weighted words,
from the peak
of a chaotic mountain
top.

What Love Is

Show me
what I loved
before I knew what love
was. When I thought
love
was cuddling
with the kittens, kisses
at bedtime, drive in
movies; when I
thought love was
Christmas lights, hot
baths, lilacs,
and thunderstorms. Before
it became

waiting
on a phone call
doing or saying
the right thing
being strong enough, slowing
down and hoping
I love you
is all
we will need
praying
every decision
the right one.

Against My Better Judgment

Against my better judgment
I tried to keep you safe
with love and promises;
with storm windows
not nearly thick enough, the glass
beaten senseless by the same rain storm
that’s been beating down
for years.

In the backyard, a childhood
lingers; remembering
my plastic frog pool catching wind,
taking off, a rolling dime
tearing through the backyards.
He ran, with longer hair then, and a
promise that was never kept—
not that day, not the day they were divorced,
not the day I broke down on both knees
begging
with a broken heart.

So when you tell me you are afraid
in the quiet dark of Saturday night, I
do the one thing that would have given me
more than any word could,
and I hold you as if my own life
depended on it.

But in that strange embrace
I think of my father, the things that have been
lost, that were never owned.
Is it a burden to believe that everything
is possible?
I never saw that pool again and I couldn’t
tell you one dream I had
then
that came true.

All I have are these arms, sometimes so thin, so
shaky, but I tried
to wrap them around us both. I tried
to grow roots,
something we could climb for years; something
to protect us from the storms we would
unknowingly begin spiraling toward
one another.
If only

they could.