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Upstream from Peeling the moon: a suite of poems by Judith Kerman   |
Walls of trees curve over, and the sun is a light of trees flowing in the crevices of bark foaming on the stones. I follow her upstream know where she's been by infrared footprints on rocks and the messages of disturbed trout: she dazzled their sleep or they jumped for a fly and caught the superheated hem of her dress. The edges of the trees still crackle they say she went by two weeks ago a leak in the sky leaving bent trees and melted waterfalls everything going the wrong way everything more beautiful now the memory imprinted in the magnetic structure of rocks in the patterns on a toad even his gold eyes. I follow her across the continent, el dorado, eden, a place I'm not sure I believe in. (No quiet pools. In my own mirror I am the modern role-reversal child; hostile, the vegetarian huntress.) Touch-me-not's flaming speckled flowers rise on their water stems, carnelian and jade, flesh full of healing jelly. They shrink away from clumsiness (who ever asks, "where is my mother?" This metaphor is too easy: river gorge, black humus of leaves.) Sudden overcast, no sun, no compass, no moss on the north side, no way to let go the chilly wind and in the old story she was looking for me (I can never be sure. All searching ghosts in these woods are mine, searching or trying to escape.) Echoes in a bend of the river where the cliff makes a pocket: "Sure. Sure. Sure." This dreaming goes on and on; everything seems to be a sign so I collect everything: prints of raccoons' baby hands; deer tracks; the skull of a German Shepherd; half a butternut shell; an old rusted wheel. It goes round and round, round and round, the place you've told me about, mother, the true north, but I didn't expect all these trees. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Previously published and copyrighted in |
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