Delia Garigan

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.