Self-Portrait as Sapphic Persephone

I.

As above, so below.

I am planting pomegranate seeds.

I am halving pomegranates,

spooning out the seeds, letting them bloody

my hands as I drop them into damp soil.

I smooth funeral mounds over pomegranate seeds.

I say a prayer for pomegranates.

I lick the juice from my fingers.

II.

When I leave the garden, they will weep for me,

will smear ash across their lips, will stitch my name

into the sides of the fish they send back.

Who am I if not their begonias?

They turn at the thought of unpetaled flesh, of a girl

more body than switchgrass, more bone than wet mud.

Who am I if not a child, dew-plucked,

feverish? They scatter their duck bones

to divine some cure for me, 

but I am impossible, that’s what

their bones say, what the stories say,

what the dirt road says when it kicks up behind me.

III.

Hades, you are more woman than god.

You ask me to braid your hair,

even though I never learned, and you

sit still, pass me a ribbon, lend me

your quiet. I think I am starting to learn.

And sometimes, I do miss the snow.

I miss trailing a finger through window frost

and knowing the difference between warm and enough.

There are a thousand little griefs I carry

the same way you carry yours,

and it isn’t shame that keeps us

here. I learned shame as marble

beads, windless heat, a caw

that cannot be named

unless you are willing

to name yourself. We hang

shame from the laundry line, our grief

sifted out, our grief

little fires that we use to light the lamps,

the lamps that light our faces

when we whisper, this I mean,

and we do. 

IV.

When I leave the garden, they will say I’m doomed.

They will, and I will not stop them.

V.

I want to weave rosettes of my hair

so that you may line your breast pocket of me,

so that you might carry me through the dawn

and press my hair to your lips as you whisper

what it is you are so afraid of, what there is

to cower from even here. We are little spaces

in the dark. We are the breath 

cupped between lips. I want to unstitch

your shadow, braid it into what is left

of my hair, wear your shadow like a bear 

cloak as though this is frost, as though we live

in the garden, as though I can still see

the wisteria in the snow, and when you hold me,

some mornings, I can. I tell myself I still can. 

VI.

The caves ache for lightning bugs.

There are enough prayers here

to line the soybean fields and then some.

Would you believe me if I told you

I don’t remember any lives before this one?

I once thought black night water

could jog my memory, that losing memory

of a memory lost would be a life

regained, but I drank daily

and still my palms are unstained.

I know I am rethreading this

in silvering twine. She is the love

I follow from the garden. She is the dark

I leave unnamed. She is dark-haired

and dark-eyed and impossible

to understand, and so I love her, instead. 

VII.

Underground water sounds me home.

Eyes closed, hand to stone, I listen

for forgiveness.

When I look, I find my feet swimming

in a spill of stars across wet shale,

the ceiling wine-dark and rippling.

In your arms, I know no gravity,

no history we cannot placate

with a touch against the inside of an elbow.

Even here, there are stars.

Even here, there is holding.

You take up the naming of things

because you must.

You take up my hands

and I know you.

There is darkness I cannot live without.

VIII.

A daughter meets a woman and gives up the garden.

A daughter meets a god and knows her as lips against wrist.

A daughter blooms Rhizanthella and knows she never belonged

in full light, in such color. A daughter lights a votive

for winters she will never know. A daughter knows grief

can be beauty, can be tenderness, can have its place

in the snow mounds she dreams above her head.

A daughter calls herself a daughter and doesn’t know

what exactly that means, and isn’t sure if she wants to.

IX.

I am leaving curses where I step

in sunbaked dirt. I am counting

bones. Do not mistake me

for something I am not.

A white oak tells me her age

in moss strokes against my palm;

she promised to love me once.

The ivy begins to untwist

from my ankles. I cannot be held

here anymore than I can unmoor myself

from dead things, from wingless birds,

a fingertip charting my back.

My collarbone aches for touch,

to be cradled, to be enmossed by years

of rain, of watercolor clouds

emptying their throats of song.

X.

What they will never know:

my mother understands.

My mother’s grief is a sailboat.

Mine is a large black hound.