SALT CIRCLES

How a plant holds tight its circle of original soil

Rifting the new

I can’t separate the roots

As hard as I try to shoot away

There are things buried

In the cold-toed earth beneath me

These ghosts feed me

in ways sunshine couldn’t

The way night-walks and the sight of mushrooms

And men crying does

Bald and unsightly

I buried so many little girls

In my back-garden

Beside cat skeletons

Under a tree where plums swelled and dropped soggy rotten

A part of me doesn’t know how dead-

Who the culprit

Whether I buried them alive

But she did die

She died

Over and over

And she is my cold roots

So many tiny toes

Rows and rows

There are so many new parts of me

So many circles drawn in salt

To exorcise the ghosts of mourning

It’s the old organs that feel wrong in my body

Like my flesh is trying to push my history from me

You can’t kill your own shadow

She scratches with my cat at the back door

She’s waiting at the window

She’s a wolf-child

You hear me?

She’s got such sharp little teeth

Dragon-hands

I love you like my little brother

Tree climber

Dog licker

Nettle-lipped with blackberry kisses

Let’s touch toes

Mine bigger and colder always breaking

I forget that you’re tangible still

The vastest organ

Skin, apple muscles

Extra-fingered collar-bones

Child of myself

Spirit and whole and live and dead

My baby ghost