Free Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster Page B

shade-intolerant. Branches brittle and breakage
    frequent
. Limbs under water. Black ash:
Neither as strong nor
    hard as white ash wood
. Black hawk falling. Squirrel call. Teeth against
    teeth against hunger. Variations of predation. What’s swallowed
    still warm in the throat. I don’t want the names of vegetation
    in my mouth, only his tongue, his different speech. Variations
    of flight and flighlessness. Crows are rooks, but rooks
    are sharper and still blacker. Nettles can make healing
    teas. Bluebells by the river ringing someone’s
    gone too far.
POEMS FOR THE FLOOD
    Hills are islands, waiting. Mountains
    will wait longer. This valley
    was once a lake, until we made it land. See how the rain
    against the windshield turns to fishes.
    Each puddle a premonition. The woman’s face
    is clearer there. When I peer in,
    the trees shift. The sky is bluer
    than the sky and when I look deeper there is the sun.
    Any rain is enough to make all the colours
    come out. The fuchsias sting my eyes
    and the bees shine. The lawn teems with drops
    that might be diamonds, might be frogs.

    The first time I ran inside and shut my house. The second
    I let it all wash over me. The third time I went looking
    where the clouds were and weeks later
    waded back with minnows in my boots.
    Between storms: a segment of train track. A red
    block with the letter O. A mouse the colour
    of bread mould. An ace of spades. Three steps going down
    and who knows how many underwater.
    I keep a canoe on the back porch just in case.
    Each morning I listen for the lap against the bedposts.
    Each morning I imagine my legs floating down the steps,
    my hair seeping back from my face.

    Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
    and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are
    is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
    and the columbines open for the same water differently.
    Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
    the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red
    rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
    The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings.

    When the first drop falls, she is there
    to meet it. The underside of her arm is a fish’s belly,
    her mouth a rain gauge. She is the watermark
    and the water rising.
    Her rusted car. Where the road was, a river the colour of asphalt.
    A rag doll is growing heavier beside her boat. Beneath,
    a catfish looms. Farther down, street signs
    and streets, yellow lines down the centre.

    Two-thirds of the earth is composed of water,
    not counting floods. I’m more water than this world is.
    Maybe that explains the shift of my organs
    during sleep, the glass beside my bed.
    The curve of the boat’s hold
    is the shape my hand makes
    when it wants something. How quickly
    my palm fills when I stop asking.
TWO BOWLS OF MILK
    Are two bowls of milk. They are round
    and white and have nothing to do
    with the moon. They have no implications
    of blindness, or sight. They wait
    on the doorstep like bowls
    or like things that closely resemble
    bowls in their stillness. The bowls do not
    foreshadow cats. There are two
    because two hands set them out
    and each wanted to hold something.
    Milk because not water. The curve of
    milk against the curve of bowl.

PERSPECTIVE IS AN ATTEMPT
FLOOD, DEER LAKE, B.C.
    I’m out in it. The water’s ruddy
    with the seepage of needles
    fallen from towering fir. Ice
    floats thinly in it, and slush,
    and patches of snow farther
    back in the trees I came from.
    It’s shallower there. Here reaches
    midway to my knees, here
    where the path was last week.
    My parents have hung back
    in soggy boots, but mine
    can take it. I might go farther
    still, not around the lake,
    as we planned, but into.
    The water’s clear white, flat,
    under slivers of ice a duck broke,
    landing. It laps at the brown rubber
    of my boots, cedar trunks.
    When was I not out there?
    If I leave here, where will I be?
ON THE STEPS OF THE MET
    When the first wasp would not stop flying