I dreamt
a watery face
The loud U.S. map
shouted all sorts of
broken arrows
feather heads and other found objects
slipped to me from fingers to fingers
by the fingers of something unknown
holy hand
I have been given the bones
of a poppy
asked to care for them
So I rubbed them with sesame oil
before moving on
Forming capitols, governing islands,
building castles to fill with
chicken and other fowl creatures,
subsisting on compliments and
continental breakfast
icing lemons in the hallway and heating
wine to its lowest boiling points,
poaching plums for the sake of poaching plums
I rattle huckleberry branches, asking for change,
charge space for the mustard seed, address the sun
ask for answers, match
my skin to the color of the
peach red in one section of
the geographic sky,
ramble on for hours until
my shoes grow too small for me
to speak. Beneath
my own personal davenport stands
the only lamp I've ever known
and the warm light that permeates
from underneath the dust ruffles
and woolen sheets,
and creates major wave lengths
which are and which measure
the shift in the tectonic plates
I find disembodied steering wheels all the time
A river runs above the house of my mother
and my father burnt his feet
running on the sands from the thinning mountains;
it was then that
he built the world's first plateau
at birth the curving world unfurled and I wore it as a
blanket and knew nothing new or different
because that was all i knew
I couldn't see ships until
the ripples caught me
solely my supine palm
could stop the leak and there
I stayed there for forty days becoming the medicine
Building small wooden things, objects of flight which were
trapping salamanders before sending them on their way;
it was how I learned of timing and rhythm
To edge the side of the swamp
and unearth the stones from the
mud
and bring them to the beach
to order a transfer of stones—
how bossy I can be
but it was defeating and uneasy and totally needed
to line the shore
I always have to prevent things from dripping
The albatross calls to me and
I respond with my eyes
I shake the clay from the thorns and
just make more of them
threading pine needles with spiderweb;
now that takes practice
breakfast and practice
Long purple light sheds fields and fields
of corn abound—
it is the same thing
as the light which
careens beneath the davenport
The coral reef screams mean things
So I motion a signal indicating 'patience'
The healers have all moved on without me
Tar brews in the rockbedpots
carved from an ancestor's locked door,
and with it I coat
the bottom of my old, old wooden ship
I offer tea to a lone mother mammal, her pains of labor
always remembered even far behind
the second coming's end
The earth has always been level, partially
nocturnal
Among the lichens and stalagmites
at the most famous bat caves
I bathe
And sweep the water with handfuls of wool sheets
off the body of my own
I can ring the rag into my mouth
And drink the juice most similar to my skin
Fish eggs float to the surface of puddles after storms
and the suggest
some form of emergence
it's all intuitive
The branches stoop slowly to pick up
the missing thing.
This there in these islands,
it is where the star sighs,
lay rest at the start of sunrise.
Currently, the world is beneath my feet
and what is this?
The exhaustion of Travel—
the result of our bodies intuitively knowing
the distance we cover
in this modern day
and how significantly we move
at speeds just as we uncover them;
it is all
so humbled and ungorgeous.
Leah Clancy is professionally living with her parents right now.