The Witch Series

               Collage by Romare Bearden

Conjure Woman

She’s got them all teetering on

the tips of her fingers, tiny as mice.

One flip of the wrist and all the men,

who ever tasted her; then turned 

their faces away, and all the men,

who drove them to ruination, 

go flying to who knows 

where, and who cares?

She holds them up in yellow

curtain light, watches them shift

their weight to keep from falling.

Each one of them knows what he’s

done or not done. It’s chilling them

to the bone to see she’s wearing her

haint blue dress. No more feathers,

no Adam and Eve root. That’s how

very much danger they’re in.

Outside, her bottle tree glistens,

as she squeezes them for good measure,

rolls them between her palms, before

laying them out like sardines

in the bottom of her reddest meanest box.

Tuesday Poem: previously published by Melusine in Summer of 2009

Moonlight Calving

They say those who begin under 
moonlight, give the richest milk.

A cow lies down in the field when it's her time.

You're summoned out of warm bed

into the damp, the clover underfoot.

The shepherds were drawn by a star,

but here in these rolling fields,

all silvered and shadowed,

you've come because you can't sleep.

There are no choirs singing.

All you hear is the lowing of one in need of relief.

You will be her annunciation, her benediction

as you reach up inside her and pull as hard as you can.

****

But the writer worries.

Who cares that they have to be yanked out?

And it hurts, goddamn it,

that she's full of a rage

she knows no one wants to hear about.

It's messier than she ever could have imagined.

Don't look away in embarrassment, though.

She delivers, she does eventually.

As she cleans it up, you'll see,

the thing will develop a presence.

This tender scaffolding of words

still too wobbly to stand,

curls on the moonlit page

fresh from its difficult birth,

****

For the sake of argument

why not say it is also effortless:

akin to Jell-O setting if Jell-O suddenly set and came alive.

One minute there is moonlight.

Well, we call it light, but really it is nothing

even remotely resembling true light:

the white of sunlight with its hidden waves of color.

This is light reflected from a body curving toward another body.

An ethereal whiteness

slowly solidifies in a field,

comes alive as a newborn calf

bleating for its mother,

and we feel the milk of its yearning,
thrill to its nudge and nuzzle.