She drinks the moonlight,
loses herself in the end of a needle, gown of the wolf’s fur
fertile ground for her sharply, tossing dreams.

With smoke straight and sinking, greeting the gone things ambulating;
in a gentle passing the departed brush and touch at her feet.

A woman only needs a man when she has been begot by mud.
A woman only needs a child when she has decided
she has outgrown her own frame.

Pale phantasm of the past, she haunts it, slowly,
pulling bodies up as beets from the dirt,
curing limbs, yanking churches out her breast,
telling the hungry ghosts they shall not enter until they have wiped their hands.

She says to me, that she believes,
some souls are too big for their physique,
and in birth they are crushed apart by a woman’s narrow opening.

The spoon she dips
into the river’s running eye
takes only a moment to be captured by her,
coolly released from itself
as the sapling from the seed.

Passages to life, she says, are small, and few,
so that the dead cannot get back through,
nor remember nor see and grieve.

A woman carries what a man cannot carry.
A woman is a door, that only allows
one
way.

I meet quiet with a womanly night, nose attuned to the musk of darkness.
In a basin I bathe and reflect, and bear the ashes and hoary leaves
like an avalanche.

Pelt of the sea, blanket of the wolverine,
overcast sky that quells garish, gruff, and unforgiving light;
silver, grey, is the color of wandering,
the color of things ending,
color of time passing, color of sleep.

Alone with my thoughts, I think of her, and how she
drinks, haunts, molds souls, between the places, grows,
in tandem with the turning, how she’s weaved me.