I was visited by five ghosts. No — it was one man.

On my twenty fifth year, I was far from home.

And the soul gasped — raw as liver, ravished and

unclothed. Fear can possess a heart, poisonously

as supernatural fruit. Will you hear me? First, he

watched me shower after the animals had gone

to sleep, the dark of an eye upon me. Was he a she,

like the soul, curious as I once was of the body

that would become my own? Second, he watched

me bathe and gave himself a beating, then hid

in the mountains until admitting what he did. Said

he was sorry. But he was not sorry. His hand —

slick on my hand. Third, he watched me change for

dinner from the head of a three-headed boy —

peeping under the tapestries. The smallest head was

blamed. He could not look at me. Forth, a voice

whispered my name, stalked me from the brush after

the sun went down — a boy my age high in the

weeds. By then, it was autumn and I finally bled —

women gowned around me with flowers and

flame as we talked about the pussy in the thistling

pastures. My wound unhaunted where I was

bitten. Fifth, the hanged man came onto me, his

shadow in the corner of my room. I have seen the

worst of man. From the tree, he cut his body down.

for Alexander

1.

South of a Scandinavian shoal, my brother

braids through the fields in his robes — braids

through the wheat and the oats, tending.

A late spring brushes through a shepherd’s grain,

brushes like the boar bristle brush

through the blond of his daughter’s hair —

blond as his own. Home with his haul,

he lifts his daughter onto his hip & holds her

by the hearth, helps her pour the honey in —

clove and cardamom crushed with their hands.

In the dark of a corner cabinet and covered

with cloth, the mead they made will bloom with

age — sung and stored in barrels out back,

buried by the parsnips sooted with snow.

2.

My brother, tucking me into bed at night,

asked me what I could see. First, cholera spelled out

on the spirit board, but only amusingly.

He had me spooked like a filly horse for a while.

I wanted to believe in the supernatural,

stories that sent me crawling into my mother’s bed.

Centuries after & strolling under big leaf

magnolias, my brother asks, if perhaps — there might

be something here? A shepherd lifts a cattle horn

cup to my lips, once an offering to a medieval grave.

Before there was cicerone, there was this:

the half note hymn of a past life, a botanical lesson

on the hillocks as sheep scurry with their herd,

the fume of burnt sugar in a sheepdog’s coat

after a day under lightning. My brother, what I see

is your heart bound to earth with my own,

a daughter with our mother’s hair — dreaming

with the glume of her father beating under

her ear. And I can hear the shepherd          calling you to me.

Walking through the field, I came upon two coyotes.

Their heads inside a snow mound, feasting.

The mink was killed affectionately, as if eating the afterbirth

from their pups. I felt coddled by their maternal

nod toward my figure, wintered like a canoness on the plain.

I watched them carry the mink by his neck,

auburned from the teeth, to their secret place, their amber

room. I envisioned them coiled in the heat

of their conclave with the immaculate garnet flesh they found.

How long will their thirst be staved before

starving? All that remained was a stain of blood, a cursive

stream of scarlet on the white sheet of the

field, and the thread — feverish and throbbing from me to

them, shredding at the stitch. Before I came

to Colorado, I sensed the coyotes with their cinereous coats

as if they summoned me, as if I conjured

them. To my sorrow, they were macerated as the mountains

stripped by settlers curing meat. Among their

kin, who turns, burning on the spit? Dreaming, they dream

of them, going up with the bush. They reminded

me of sisters, banished from the world they knew. In

another life, were they accused of sorcery, hair of

flame let down in the field. They were the light that

grew in the gale. The pastor with his sola scriptura,

swelling with superstition under his robes. He is the

hunter that cannot be redeemed. Every year, the

coyotes wait for the sisters to return to the field. They

watch them set fire to the wheat¹. Match against the

book, autumn ablaze with anguish and gone by dusk.

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¹ The final three lines allude to part 3 of Louise Glück’s “Landscape”