Come, I say, wanting to get it right this spring
because where you are is always a vision 
of April and you turning back from the sun- 
white windows of that cafe, your mouth, still 
in my mind, a chapel statue’s smile. I understand
the quiet violence in your womb that I insisted,
killed us. Tonight, toeing the chest of a dead wren,
soft palace of ants that gnaw and dream of flying,

I know I should have told you 
how I can slip off like daylight, 
or how much I wanted to rise in a landscape 
of my choosing--no surf of freeways, just 
sky scratched by distant birds. 
Out here a plague of tree rats trace the power lines;
like fears at dusk, they grow bold. 
My neighbor told me to get a .22 or I’d never last. 

He doesn’t know the dead are still forever 
sacred in the stations of the imagination. 
By the time you’d get here the cold will have quit. 
There’s a room, a dresser and the invisible wires 
of satellites to make you feel safe.
This isn’t me breaking down, again. Just kneeling 
awhile in the fields of brown grass around here.  
I found a half-sunk, plaster St. Francis 

with bird-shit epaulets, counselor to sparrows and men. 
Why not believe we have some grace coming?  
Today’s paper said the Madonna is appearing 
in the gravel parking lot of a Rite Aid 
								
near the border. Children tell she has a patience 
that speaks of us eventually finding ourselves 
in another life. Hasn’t it always been this way? 
What we require. Resurrection.  

Tonight, stars are floating like sparks above the fire I set.
If she’s really there, it’s like a trace
of the kind smoke makes signaling transformation. 
Listen, this is an old and open place. In the evening, there’s
something in the wind snapping softly like hung laundry. 
And the sky?  It could be a woman in glittering black,
one hand reaching down, touching the hole in my side,						
one hand tipping the cradle of the moon.