(A collage of lines/phrases drawn from Adrienne Rich poems in the first two sections of Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995)
Our Country
Moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its ways of making people disappear.
The birds of history plunge
through the rags of fog where we stand
saying I:
I want more.
I know what it means to be lied to.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Light peeled like an onion, down to nothing
as it flicks across the tracks,
as it dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers.
*
Some snakes in the house.
This is for you:
firestorm
fire dreamnet
a place not to live but to die in.
Your heart unbroken--
how is this possible?
This leaping, insulating
fog that melts
the virus from the smash.
Once we were dissimilar
yet unseparate.