Jan Verberkmoes.

Diversion/Division

What kind of snake are you capable of—

They said I’d find you somewhere in the settlement
between here and childbirth

outside this town where every man is men.        keep looking

in the throat of the passerine
the air has a choice       between alarm and song

Behind me the snowpack thaws in a slow stampede:
child man animal man              can slip seamlessly

between consonance and dissonance

Night is traceless on the waterskin
as it sheds from the mountain.

What urgency if we already number
among the dead. What water if no body.

a sibilance of ice on ice. I find you here, gone,

you dripped a trail for no one to follow home.
Isn’t blood someone’s bread—

River       scaled and splitting       teach me that trick again
where the snow won’t melt on your skin.

Endless Retrieval

He departs into fissured grasslight, switch-thin birches.
Dawn waters down.

His mule, shifting under her load, tosses her head at his touch,
and he digs his thumb into the broad meat of her shoulder

hard and she remembers who he is. He says

I’ve been mistaking things lately—luggage for language
accident for ancient        binding for bidding,

forgetting the count       man man animal child animal.
Did I kill or be killed—

He stumbles under the weight of no animal on his back

and the morning fractures in his hands. Accident, ancient.
Endless retrieval            he begins again.

No animal wants to die          so why does the mule
walk off into the dry riverbed          burdened and blistering

searching for no one
and no one following        clumsy over the shale?

She tosses her head and remembers.

House

Lavender,    piano-hands,
won’t you press    your black  -fretted neck
into a trilling    stream?

I’ll dance           for as long    as you’ll play.
Everyone’s gone          asleep    in the grass
and I think       we’re just two.

I want     to twist my body
into whatever song   your finger     -throat touches.
To slip       this blue   integument   that fills

and stills     with our wet      breath.
Sing us cleanly      through.       This house
only a hand     on your hand.

Vantage Point

A man stands                  at the lake edge, a girl on either side.

Straight, spines not yet recoiled.

The lakebed is ash.

There is no one in the water.

He lifts his finger to the mountain ranges, calls them       dog, girl, mother, summer.

We are the girls       and can see only a fringe of lavender thinning into blue horizon,
can name only the evergreens—             white pine and fir.

We wade into the ash.

A Nighthawk booms the water.

Mule

When thrown      from the mule
it is best     to let the body       drop slack,     as though sloughed,

to feign the state         of relaxation.

When you land           and your mouth      gouges the gritted earth,
simply abandon     the chipped tooth     to the dirt.

The mule bares his teeth—      sawed and dully white.

To search for you        shows intolerable     attachment
but I know you’re here somewhere,                star-splayed

and blue, face    opened. There,    your body’s gone silver        where it’s bent.
Do you know yet       all the points         at which it won’t       yield?

The tongue in its bed      floods with blood.

What a sweet boy          what a nice       man

only you     could see piano keys     in the mule’s mouth,
could hear a song        in the rhythm of white.

Temporal Resolution

and I falter as the tiger beetle sprints into blindness.
Granular fracture, the vision field crackles.
Mesh of his eyes unable to gather enough light from his prey,
he collides instead with the crease of a knee,
pauses, turns away. The evergreens rasp and whine in the heat.

If speed is desire, certainty dissolves as I approach—
leg or arm, or limb draped in leather? Some gracefully jointed animal.
Listen for the hunt     the silent detonations that tighten sleep:
fist after fist of light like craving. The pinecones crack at the seams.
Each cone of light blinds me to the knee, the beetle,
to the damp cloth of day poised to snap back
and reveal them whole or gone. The trees ratchet up the alarm.

An Oregon native, Jan Verberkmoes currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she is a John and Renée Grisham Fellow at the University of Mississippi and a candidate for an MFA in poetry.