AT FOUR IN THE MORNING
	


			At four in the morning, my children come
			scratching, slithering beneath
			the bedroom door where they lick my ears,
			make fingers itch, squeeze at my breast;


			
			disembodied, they beg to be mothered.


			
			At four in the morning, my children screech
			nagging me to nurse them then shake them 
			off the tit so they can swarm out
			and sting other people's sleeping breasts.


			
			
			                        LIFE BYTES
			


			1. Girl


			
			When she fell through ice on the pond, she said 
			it was an accident, but she did it on purpose, 
			denying chill or fear, so she could walk on water.


			
			When she climbed out the window, scrabbled 
			over loose clay tiles, she told herself it was
			safe to spring from the roof because she could fly.


			
			When she night-prowled through the old sawmill, 
			she believed herself invisible, strong enough to 
			walk through walls, tall enough to touch the moon.


			
			And when she paddled the Flambeau, needled canoes 
			down through its high, unrunnable rapids, 
			she knew she'd survive because she was immortal.


			
			2. Woman


			
			When he said he loved her and would do so forever, 
			she said yes, because she walked through walls
			and on water.  Then, taking flight, she hung the moon.


			
			Now when the moon waxes and wanes, she ponders 
			old wounds and fresh crime, aware magic ebbs, 
			trails grow faint until he is distant and hard to track.


			
			When winter tides rise and fall, when lifelines
			fray, she is slurried in and out of undertow 
			conscious of mortality for he is too deep to reach.


			
			And when blackness rages him, she seeks a lost girl, 
			a girl who had supernatural powers, because 
			it is murky and she cannot touch him or the moon.


			
			
			 Automatic Writing
			


			In the waxy, flickering darkness,
			wheels of the heart-shaped planchette roll 
			from side to side, up and down,
			over and back, responding to the edgy pressure
			of their four hands.  Grease pencil
			in its brass holder marks butcher paper
			with fluid, gyroscopic script.


			
			Once four hands gathered wild berries, 
			bathed hair and feet for one another 
			in a snow-melt cascade.  Once at night on 
			black pond-ice, four hands spun votive candles, 
			turned them to winter fireflies.  And once 
			they lay till morning on the hen house roof,
			hands warm inside clothes 
			as Perseid meteors confettied the sky.


			
			Now hands guide the planchette, and tension
			rises.  This is bullshit, he says. I'm leaving.
			And so it is.  And so he does.  And when 
			she examines the butcher paper, 
			she finds only chicken scratchings 
			or fragments of a hieroglyphic lament.


			
			
			UNDINE


			
			After the leaving, the long, dry loving.
			All that has ended was obsession,
			so parting was more logic than sea-change.
			Once danger was palpable,
			the dream where our children writhed
			in forked branches of coral
			became too real.
			Now, without rake of lashes, we spin
			out impersonal lines,
			weaving strands of our children.
			The net we create is for safety
			lest we dip again into pools of madness.

 
			
			After me, he says with quiet sanity,
			there has never been another.
			Still, since we've been apart, volcanic ash
			has altered colors of the sunset
			and milky, eyeless fish have found 
			their way to new-made ocean fissures.
			Alone, watching seasons of sunsets pass, 
			I think of those pale, unrealized 
			creatures and of him 
			recumbent in asphodel waiting...