POEMS
Marea Gordett
WHEN I WAS YOUNG
I always loved the word, foothills .
A little shape of nothing stands in the hills
pygmying out its life. On the other
hand, I hate the words: pretty, cuneiform, and hog.
Today, driving to the pretty foot-
hills, a cuneiform hog dashed across the sky.
This is to say, the fog
of confusion crossed my mind.
And confusion, what do we know of its lives?
In
the deadnight, in the scorch of moon
it rises on its spy legs,
howling a jinx.
That's what you hear when you think:
wind.
And the wind, will it admit this?
It
crawIs it crawIs
on the brown foothills,
mistralling a song.
Yesterday I heard the song twisting
the white birch and understood the sweet
cold lies, a child believing
everything she hears .
When I was young I thought a human
being was a legume
grown in the idea of birth.
I thought tarantula was the name
of death, living in the fruit of foreign countries,
I thought if you sat on the foothills
eating a banana
you could hear the dead walking on the other world.
