Underfoot

i.

all mistand movement

my daughteris messingwith her hairwith her newbody

at the mirror

old dogwarming my sleep

and a memoryheld betweenthe fingertips

smoothpurple glassbead

ii.

how slowly

my heart and lungs

the shining reeds            filled

with grey sunwith lichen stone

if i scrub the linensif i apply the maskbrush out the knots            –oh

dusty banjo

your voicea spiderleg ahummingbirdwing

iii.

at the edge of the playground the ice was forming its beautiful shapes and crackling up under a black spruce where i could tell that it wanted to love me that it could not did not love me but there were all sorts of voices roaming around in the sunlight in the crystals and i caught one and dropped it into my pocket where it remained i can still hear it burning there

iv.

envythe gardena white rosebrowning

photographserrated leaf

and grandfather’sprize mountain goatsharpeninghorn

and it was earlywhen i followed youinto the languageinto the circle of men

with my thick hide

and smokethe censerhuffingbeardtongue (a certainviolet)

chanting

v.

no, noflux

this morninggreylight

— far away            the girlis dead —is dead is dead is

deadeadeadeadeadeadead

robinin the yard

vii.

my riverwalk my thinleaf my alder my rhododendron fungus and canker and salmonberry ghost in and out of the goldleaves with her button jar with her jam jar jelly jar pie tin the ground is the same ground moving and loving and the faraway roar of the river i walked in the dieback root rot duff and sweet humus woven into my skin my palms my spine my heartaloneafraid i was just a kid myself in the autumntime in the leafmold in the shame the detritus

viii.

daughteryour slim waist

            at night

the gardenarrivesso lovely so

your cuppedhands

the stubborn            nasturtium

Born and raised in Anchorage, Caroline Goodwin moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from Sitka, Alaska, in 1999 to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry. She teaches at California College of the Arts and the Stanford Writer’s Studio and is currently serving as San Mateo County’s first Poet Laureate. Her most recent work is Peregrine from Finishing Line Press.

If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.