
Michaela
Forest
I found I was a ghost town
Filled with spirits of some who'd been before
Landscape pitted with the robbery
Of mustachioed men
Whose faces stayed off posters
Newsprint autobituaries halo them.
I found I was a ghost town
Indentured voices echoing in empty streets
Incrementally beggared:
Pine to prairie to mine to desert
And left to tumbleweeds,
Never still, yearning for life.
I found I was a ghost town and I
Lined the slapped-up clapboard with dynamite
Laid and lit the fuses, danced in explosive catharsis
Vira de cura, returning to the wild.
How strange--the railway people who'd shamed my barren mercantile
Rail at my destroying the façade,
Insisting I build back that abandoned Town & Co.
I will not have it
My bent is all toward trees,
Limbs lifted as I tap roots through earth,
Twisting with the naked joy of turning
Light to air, sweet'ning deep channels,
Channeling dryad secrets in
My greenling heart.
How it burns! power rising from that knot
Tying me together, my navel a cauldron Spilling smoke and spores and stars across my
Lichen-laced, spell-simple, soul
All capped in blue.