BPR 48 | 2021
The yew’s needles, that mish-mash
of pound signs and hash marks,
tagging who knows who,
have snagged a small web:
hammock the eye can ride,
cloud snit, snow thistle.
The no-see-ums dot
the web and the air
around me, little eaters
who nip my bud,
whatever that might be:
a wing, a tooth, a brood
of worries. Oh small-blooded
ones, we’re kin;
now I won’t quit you though I can’t
requite you. You mob
the red and black salt box
whose white ate the snow’s
last year. Abandoned,
it bulges, a rock of salt, a block
assault on neat and put away
It memorializes
our lackadaisical
forget-and-don’t-look—
like Lot’s wife, whose
looking at the ruined
forbidden city astonished her
into salt. Why salt?
I bet she wept:
her whole damned body
became tears’
indifferent residue.
The weird logic
of metamorphosis:
by god: Medusa’s beauty
earns her a coif of snakes:
here and now, chorus
of keening, a siren
and a black and white hound
actually called Carol—
the two ululations
braid and rise so high
they hurt to hear.
Is it consoling
that earth metamorphoses
minerals, charges, urges, maybe
soul, and salts it away
into place?
The yew tags us all,
or will. The mystery
that luck or providence has wrought
is that wary and aware
even are, when witness turns
to tears, salt, stone.