Shade
I am trying to speak like an adult
while the shadow of the past goes racing over the aspens.
This is the summer of butterflies—I mean the actual thing—
& swarming bumblebees
a world so changed since childhood
I am surprised I startle to see you:
breath shocks & the thirty-some years I’m dragging
gasp below your towering bones.
We learned spelling together, wanted something
from one another beyond fractions & maps.
Our history is a game I lose badly today
all childhood lurking and clamorous.
These days I eat mangoes sliced at every meal,
more mangoes than ever & never enough;
it takes every measured pause to not launch across
decades of body-warm space. You, now—
look at me. I have been a woman long enough and yet
I know the taste of you under the trees.
I know the way these things come undone.
At the foot of October
Cool winds hum a reckoning
in secret corners by shelf and door
through the fuzz of lint from hair and clothes
Arrivals on dark legs, afternoons push
dinner ahead of them. Islands rise
through a viscous ocean—
like a mind’s struggle for substance.
At the foot of October
old debts come due:
blade-raked hand; bloody swim
a brave stripe on pavement.
Knives in audience
spit disapproval.
Until the door blows shut,
I cannot enter the day.
As a child in rural Oregon, Delia Garigan assumed animals understood her words. She has spent time as a research scientist and a Zen monastic, but still does not understand how words birth the world. Her poems have been published in Animal, Phantom Drift, Windfall, and VoiceCatcher.
