The Trailhead - Kerri Webster Wesleyan Poetry Series

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bore their dirty traffic into pine trees.

      God says, You cling to deixis

      like a life raft. Here, you say. Now,

      you say. All winter, you say, like it means

      something, days crossed off your compulsive

      calendar, wind tied to your wrist

      like a pet. This dumb hunger for fixity!

      I made your cells to shed, says God.

      She bites her lip till it bleeds.

      Who wouldn’t immanentize the eschaton

      if they could, build heaven on earth

      in the backyard? She wouldn’t, is who.

      Day a slit-throated ewe.

      To ground herself, she strips berries

      from juniper bushes.

      Well, says God, Alexander the Great

      dyed his hair saffron. We are all

      made fools in this world.

       HILL WALK

      Come let us poison all the honeybees for we

      are in world’s dotage—insensible—and

      seeing things: spectral migrations; unholy

      gyres; squid that light up; a yew tree struck

      by lightning, which must mean something;

      a back lashed until it suppurates and comes apart

      like what paper the wasps spit out; a blinded man

      held in a cell for years for

      what, for what—

      and the river slivers the dark.

      And someone says, Cast him out at gates and let him

       smell his way to Dover;

      and centuries pass; and then

      someone says it again; and if

      we are not cruel, perhaps it is only

      because we are too tired to be cruel.

      I dream hounds that bite my belly, teeth

      to the softest skin. My needs grow simple

      until nothing of me needs

      redacting. I walk the hills by night;

      I want to put them in my mouth.

      There is an hour at which

      the foothills silver—

      if there are snakes, they are for sleeping.

      I go where called.

       And cry these dreadful summoners grace?

      There is an hour at which all manner of dark

      miracles appear—

      like, foxes; or, shame; or,

      the soldier’s legs leave his body

      and walk on by me;

      or, strips of skin from off the man’s back

      half a world away

      fly by my face

      as ash—

      and all birds are ghosts of the bird

      I once drowned in a paper cup

      after the cat tore it open but

      it kept breathing. Tonight the gulch

      eats tire rims and colored pencils, the gulch

      eats foxes, and pulses

      as we sleep, and as we sleep

      the appetites continue, and what we harm

      smells its way towards us.

       HULLS GULCH

      Months from any tree becoming remotely fragrant yet one cannot remain in bed. What if, by the time things forsythia, we no longer recognize the flora, believe it’s some sort of apocalypse, are possibly afraid? The pall clots, a sharpness at the temples. The sky pretends at simple. I have no quarrel with figments. Night garden, whetstone, small alien ships of seedpods tangled on the barbed wire. Here is the skull of the hummingbird on a chain around my neck. Let us pretend it’s fleshed, the chain a leash; let us be sad souls who keep bones on silver threads. In the theater, the couple in the next row masturbated each other in the dark, dove noises as the city burned. After, I drove into the hills, past the reedy underbrush that pretends at fire. I hiked on; the pall did not dissolve, though I felt a little better, thank you.

      Here the trailhead; here the sagebrush; here the creek, the glass house on the cliff, the telephone wires, the dust kicked up so that I am never without my vials of eye drops—“thinking for hours together of having the knife she gave me put in a silver-case—the hair in a Locket—and the Pocket Book in a gold net”—the absences tangible as hummingbird skulls. Having come to the trailhead, I crave a speechless place caught up in a gold net.

      Grit in my teeth and the sky about to tear, I peer into the cleft two boulders make. Eye to the dark, I hear impossible water. I am learning to allow for visions. The cliffs give up a sound like howling, which merges with actual howling to become a system of enormous potential. A lightninged thicket; a road sliced out of winter; a tooth buried in the bark of a tree; a bowl of lathed yew; a ewe split like a peach but still bleating. I walk and walk. Like a jellyfish or annunciation, the heliodore-yellow underlying everything shimmers, is gone.

      Often when I wake the furniture’s slightly haloed, sleeping pill screwing with the visual cortex, a pleasant holiness. I believe he went home with her smell on his fingers; I believe that on the trail are many handsome dogs. The acedia hums and hums. Soon, excess and magnolia, snow in the mountains moving toward us as runoff, great volumes of water pulled into the valley, swans on the riverbank drinking that snow. I will sit by the trail until my head stops hurting. I will try not to be afraid.

       THE NIGHT GROVE

      The torturer wants to know

      how one minute blood, one minute

      snow. She wants the windows

      closed. The draft. Light breaks

      across his back.

      She lets the torturer put his head in her hands.

      Tells him about Flanders,

      the speaking dead.

      We are the Dead, they say.

      Where snow falls

      in the taxonomy of the greater and lesser

      desires: it falls on the taxonomy. On the money

      and on the torso. On the fur.

      She tells the torturer:

      first, for practice, they bayonetted

      straw men. Missing their villages, winter

      descending. And then

      the soft flesh of stomachs

      attached to bodies

      tied to trees.

      He says,

      that is a very ancient story.

      She says, Simon Peter stirred the fire. There

      in his animal body.

      Yes, he says. Breath milk-warm

      on

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