Of Earth

Of Earth

Old mistakes come calling: no life

happens just once.  Whatever snags

even the edge of your days will abide.

You are a turtle with all the years on your back.

Your head sinks down into the mud.

You must bear it.  You need a thick shell in all that rain.

                                                                                                William Stafford

                                                                                                Mein Kampf

Clay, like peat, is best cut wet she says,

and stacked up out into a faithful wind

and sun, to draw all that aged water

from it, to turn it day by day

into a stone of itself, combustible

maybe or form enough in its own

shape to make a sister and a brother,

a wall and then a room and then,

if enough’s cut and molded a whole

house for you to hide away in far

from the rain or even the sun that dried

you or when the sun withdraws

altogether, log after log of rock-hard peat

that maybe you’ve never

seen but perhaps tasted maybe

in the curling places in your brain

when you kissed your Irish grandmother’s

skin and imagined the old

country and her mother's peat fires

and the small cottages she’d fled

from by coming to America.  Or all that

clay mud to make the deepest

cathedrals, the basement grim places

you knew well when she chucked

you to your only memories

of her and her thwarted (maybe

she didn’t even try you consider) rescue

when you were three and beaten repeatedly

with the garden hose, her son’s

wife taking you in while your mother

her child too sobered enough to prove

she knew to cook a meal, go to work, wash

a smock. . .it took

nearly five years.  By then the moss

that had set on the floor of you was drawing

small flies and you began

to stink but with a stink that mattered

only to you and it built you

stones to throw it built you

fuel to fire when the stove was cold

and it was hard to light when you

got home and you didn’t admit

you wanted to be

warm and you didn’t say

you wanted to be

alone and wasn’t only one of these

things true?  Though wasn’t it

hard to know which one

when you stepped in?  You carried it all

in the same hod.  And your grip of the dark

was a gamble: which brick

you’d lay down and if you’d

light it or throw it or stack it like the architect

of your own hearth and crypt.