"this is what summer should be"

a blackwinged brighthearted fairie ladygirl said about this poem... Not so sure.

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deergirl summeride-

I know I'm free when I let the wind dry my hair on a sunset bike ride, some ghost-transplant from a mother-tea-tree-teacher time, a city truly connected finding roots in this sun-burn suburbs, let the summer storm air tie knots in my hair and leave them—as markers, a fence against fingers, tokens of a brook-smooth lightning-laced affection.

When the first thing
in my morning
is sleep.

Then sun-tea from stolen packets, my grandmother's glass jars.

That makes your face third— like bronze, like a charm— how I wish you were here, and not. How actuality ruins ideal; the sour taste of mixed teas steeped too long.

Know I'm free when the bike veers off the path as oleanders and jasmine sing my blood to summer and I feel no fear, only enchantment with the deadly fuschia blooms, only humble amusement at the wry twisting of my own course.

When my bike-body follows behind a young mother, quiet as Deer, her daughter smiling into my eyes just before I take that turn, around the twilight cedars, too quick for rational minds to catch. I'm a ghost, a deer-girl, the breeze gentler and sweeter on my shoulders—fuzzy nape of my neck—up those too-long-arms—gentler and sweeter than any touch yes even my own, and I wonder if you see me like that sometime—swift and dear and desirable, like a color or taste from childhood, a joy you could always feel—mother's first smile, your father's spicy-scented sweater you wore that first time to the coast, soft against six-year-old-skin, that decaying-salt-bright taste to ocean air familiar to you as cigarette smoke to me—how deep those images go—wool red, slate-gray mornings, freckled skin—I wonder,if that soul -secret isn't so much falling in love as it is chasing after it, some completeness we cannot name but even scientists pine for.

I know I'm free when I can see my beloved from across a meadow and pick my steps carefully (deer girl drawn to your salty skin, the grain of your bluesweet eyes, what salt waits behind them—vast, dry oceans my feet were made soft to cross) and I am still wary, no matter how much your dog-eyed soul tells me never fear, darling – rose and jasmine sing themselves under my skin a song of summertime without leashes, my tangled hair tying me to the foxtails, dry grass, fallen trees crisscrossing the meadows...

No matter how close I get I can never tell if there are ropes in your hands—I'm always prancing round, caught in some jewelled glass jar, anxieties hot from the sun, glass box of ideal and reality, sunset playing on the planes of your face like a running brook in my mind, a stream of things I wish were like the landscape flying by—deer-girl a ghost at your fingertips, mind far-flung even when our skin makes some wildflower palette put so close together—deer-girl almost out of reach, weighing jasmine blooms a cedar-rosemary-melody, a two-wheeled summer against a doe-eyed, fearful freedom...

North Prayer

I give thanks for the fish my man-family greedily steals; far over the limit though not beyond what we can eat. They gloat over sizes and granddaddy stories, whine about aching feet and I know we could have afforded another meat for our supper, but even if our bellies are filled their souls will only be stilled by the rhythm of the fly rod, the focus of the deep pool and softly-loud stream. Is that not need? I ask the corn mother, and yes, she says, men with unhappy day jobs and concrete between their toes seek to be gods on the weekend pursual of innocent bucks, the rocky silence of wilderness and brash backslappings of boys.

Where else can we be men? they ask, and sky father answers, All places under me—but they do not hear. This thankless ungrounded society deludes them, tells them men take and take and power over and beat down and conquer, and they carry this harsh unhonoring with them, from degrading their mates to chasing the antelope until their aging bodies throb, then go back to the cabin full of cheap brews and steaks that died afraid, where they will scrape out their gut-souls with more granddaddy stories and feigned fireside anger. Men? I ask, and as His bearded breeze sweeps through the aspens, they quake with Her laughter, they carry away my whispered prayers of gratitude as I stand by the tail-gate, enraptured by rainbow scales and cold eyes trapped in a Ziploc—brown trout, fingerlings, rainbows, people earth-darker than I say that their wisdom comes from always knowing which direction home is.

Even in my father’s oil-stained hands the hooked trout twists strong as a snake, as a bent willow, seeking the water, the upstream. My boy-family is as out of place in cities, in Wal-Marts and strip malls, but where is their fight to seek the ground? Ten minutes ago this fish was slipping through the stream beside me, unaware, and now lies on my plate floured and browned. I never enjoyed eating fish, and I still don’t. When they take fine-boned meat within themselves, what do the men-boys learn, I ask? Plastic, uncaring, downpayments and empty screens—how much more can my father take, how does he keep his gills fluttering so long away from the hills and the oak? With this, the trees murmur through mud in my jeans, the wind coaxes answers from my creek-washed hair. And I give thanks, for warm muscle sliding down my throat, for my father’s fumblings, for the quaking aspen, for the lies that drive us to seek the intensity of these long hauls and payless days, this condensed, desperate forest loving.

Kestrel Poetry

While trying to decide whether/what psuedonym to use for this blog, I considered the first: Kestrel. A name I went by for four of the hardest years of my life, with people that knew nothing about me, and where I first found my love of community--and long before I was ever interested in animal medicine. It reminds me of fire, that high when you're doing something you love.
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Kestrel, feathered ferocity, the gutteral feminine winged thing, kess-trulll...
If oak is storm embodied then you are wind breathing in down and talons: the dive and rise, scooped wing and soft call, feather and claw, feather and claw.

HOW TO BUILD A KESTREL
After Kathleen Lynch's "How to Build an Owl"

Gather grassland feathers: storm hues. Brown black cobalt blue. Moon's cream. Make sure they rustle; sing folk songs.

Assemble in layers: slim bone, knife sharp feathers, agile as air herself.

Palms together now, eyes to the sky. Whisper, prey.

Feed ballet slippers, running shoes--try the diet of grace yourself and the wind will still catch you but not her, not your raptor womanly as mountains. Ferocity comes last, polished into every edge, especially the unsharpened.

The breeze is her jess and storms leather bells, please Mother, let her lift off. Do not watch for which tree she lands in. There are none here, none that you can see.