Porcupine
You think we are the pointed argument,
the man drunk at the party showing off his gun collection,
the bed of nettles.
What we really are is hidden from you:
girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather’s boots;
tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby
in the landfill; boy with the shy mouth playing his guitar
at the picnic table, out in the dirt yard.
We slide into this world benign and pliable,
quills pressed down smooth over back and tail.
Only one hour here stiffens the barbs into thousands
of quick retorts. Everything this well−guarded
remembers being soft once.
Mnemosyne´s Mausoleum
Tobacco smell and the taste of buttered parsnips
are stored in far−flung coffins in the brain,
a catacomb of sensory descriptions
that the tiniest encounter disinters.
They all lie down together, and if left unstirred
by mice, or brush of garment whooshing by,
the sense of steamy water on bare skin
can mix with coyotes waking up the night.
The crossover of memory, forming new
experiences that never really were
can make a bookstore lush with trumpet vine,
or layer frozen windows in the car
with licorice, or mango, on the tongue.
The hybrid of this intermingled storage
can trick the ear that thinks it hears a train,
make it think instead of the underwater language
of blue whales, or babies crying in their beds.
We’ve pressed our rich collection
into such slim space. If the shine of coreopsis
is now blocked by blankets on the line, or drive−in movie
screens, it means the world we travel backward through
has a deeper depth of field than when we came.
