Frances Stanton, Cottonwood Idaho, 1889

It is written: where your treasure is,
your heart be also, but
a broken shoelace shouldn't make me weep.
Easier to gather grapes from buckthorn
figs from purple thistle flower than
dispel this inner darkness.
What is it they tell children
while thrashing hazelnut switches
in front of cracked faces: stop blubbering
before I give you something to cry about?
Where's the treasure amid a landscape
as featureless as oatmeal,
endless oven-hot winds and ice pick rocks?
Dust in my shoes, behind my collar. And beneath me,
razoring through a dry river of brown
bent grass like the hair of the dead, a snake.
What was it mother used to say . . . cried because
I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.
And when you lose the secret shelf your soul sits on,
where's the silver lining then? What's worse than this
drum rolling electrical storm of the self?
The sting of November's never-ceasing rain,
a phlegm-gray sky for months on end?
When did I first look up into the firmament,
seeing holes where stars had been?
How desperate I've become:
My shoestring has broken, the frayed end
undone again and I've no other laces.
My boot flops like a palsied head –
a lolling tongue letting grit steal in, my heel a bed
of pearl blisters. What cleanses the spirit
when Jordan turns brackish?
My neck too weak to hold up my chin.
Bonnet so heavy, I remove
the brim slats, let the bill droop
across my face, a veil shielding my eyes:
I imagine that small snake's
dark serpentine the shade-cooled
milk and honeyed Hallelujah shore of my youth.

Stand up, Mrs. Stanton. Stand and tie your shoe.
You ask for bread, here is a stone;
you ask for fish, here is a serpent. But
many rocks piled will build you a house;
even ravenous wolves fear the tiniest snake.
Where your treasure is, your heart be also.