Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness

Go and catch a falling star,
    Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
    Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
            And find
            What wind
Serves to advance an honest...

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?
’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies...

Lonely, open, vast and free,
The dark'ning desert lies;
The wind sweeps o'er it fiercely,
And the yellow sand flies.
The tortuous trail is hidden,
Ere the sand-storm has passed
With all its wild, mad shriekings,
Borne shrilly on its blast.

Are they fiends or are they demons
That wail weirdly as they go,
Those hoarse and dismal cadences,
From out their depths of woe?
Will they linger and enfold
The lone trav'ler in their spell,

Weave ‘round him incantations,
Brewed and bro't forth from their hell?
Bewilder him and turn him
From the rugged, hidden trail,
Make him wander far and falter,
And trembling quail
At the desert and the loneliness
So fearful and so grim,
That to his fervid fancy,
Wraps in darkness only him?

The wind has spent its fierce wild wail,
         The dark storm-pall has shifted,
Forth on his sight the stars gleam pale
         In the purpling haze uplifted.

And down the steep trail, as he lists,
         He hears soft music stealing;
It trembling falls through filmy mists,
         From rock-walls faint echoes pealing.

Whence comes this mystic night-song
With its rhythm wild and free,
With is pleading and entreaty
Pouring forth upon the sea
Of darkness, vast and silent,
Like a tiny ray of hope
That oft-times comes to comfort
When in sorrow's depths we grope?

'Tis the An-gu, the Kat-ci-na,
'Tis the Hopi's song of prayer,

That in darkness wards off danger,
When 'tis breathed in the air;
Over desert, butte, and mesa,
It is borne out on the night,
Dispelling fear and danger,
Driving evil swift a-flight.

I can remember my father bringing home spruce gum.
He worked in the woods and filled his pockets
with golden chunks of pitch.
For his children
he provided this special sacrament
and we’d gather at this feet, around his legs,
bumping his lunchbox, and his empty thermos rattled inside.
Our skin would stick to Daddy's gluey clothing
and we’d smell like Mumma's Pine Sol.
We had no money for store bought gum
but that’s all right.
The spruce gum
was so close to chewing amber
as though in our mouths we held the eyes of Coyote
and how many other children had fathers
that placed on their innocent, anxious tongue
the blood of tree?

Such is their greed that no part is thrown away.
Not crown, not base, not even the eyes
gouged out from the rind by the eye-eaters.
But why do I speak ill of them? I’m no better.
When I throw away the rind my...

This, what God feels like: laughing
alone in an empty room of tiny doors,
behind every door a metal box, inside each
a man’s red heart, lying. I don’t write
of the cartoonish thing split and jagged
at its insides. Instead, of how I break
even...

I don’t know who needs to hear this
other than me, but the moon will never leave
you, you are good enough for the moon
and the moon is good enough for you,
because you are here and the moon is there
every time the...

All things begin from the spindle,
we say—life spun from graces.
I grew like rain from rumbles of my parents’
cloud, a dark dawn, admitting growth.
In the beginning, I squeeze into existence with a head,
white, silhouette-like—formed from
the stomach of the hard earth on...

My body is
perfect and
imperfect and
black and
girl and
big and
thick hair and
short legs and
scraped knee and
healed scar and
heart beating and
hands that hold and
voice that bellows and
feet that dance and
arms that embrace and
my momma’s eyes and
my daddy’s smile and
my grandma’s hope and

my body...

We all have the same little bones in our foot
twenty-six with funny names like navicular.
Together they build something strong—
our foot arch a pyramid holding us up.
The bones don’t get casts when they break.
We tape them—one phalange to its neighbor for...