Devreaux Baker

The Bee-Keeper's Daughter

Bees are drawn to the
Center of things.
It is nature’s way
To bring them in close to her
Body
And hold them there
Humming in place.
So her kisses taste of honey
Stolen after midnight
The sweetest kind,
And she opens herself wider each dawn
So they can reach deeper into her body.
Her breath on their wings
Is a braille of light and dark.
Their shadows remember the sun,
Forget the moon
In their hurry to disappear
Before night falls
Across their hives.

Instruct me
As the earth instructs the bees.
Find me the place
Where they hide from the moon,
Drunk with so many sweet syllables
Tucked into their bodies.
Bring me into this wideness
This curvature of space the earth offers.
Blinded by their faith
The bees are swept away
Into the soft throat of day.
Bring me with you. Take me
Into that grammar
Of light.

A Cartography Of Water

Water binds me to you
Stone encased or sky-vaulted
Rivers bind me to you with their names
Yampa, Tigris, Euphrates, White, Red, Colorado, Snake
Oceans bind me to the blind speech
Of your past, the ebb and flow of the dark weight of that grief
Manifested in the violent history of this land
To listen to the water
I lay my ear next to sand so
Secrets flood my body
Water hides nothing, in this way she surrenders time
To motion.
In another life we took boats down a nameless river
We were chained in the bottoms
Of terrible ships to suffer
Solitude, starvation or abandonment
Death in the land of foreigners.
Sun, air and salt mark the lines
Water maps on our bodies
We settled in the elbow of the San Juan Range or on a flood plain,
Or at the mouth
Of a buried spring and watched how light thinned our lives
Water did not forget to remind us how our lives were laid out against
The life of a river.
In this way voyage becomes a cartography
Caressed by liquid ghosts humming a beginning in blue and an ending
In an avalanche of green that only knows
To follow a sky calendar.
Water binds me to you.
How many rivers carried the bodies of the massacred,
Rocked lost souls to sleep or set dreamers free
Past the color of their skin or their sexual longing
Water binds me to the ending place where souls
Scatter like seeds
And all rivers trace a lifetime in rings around a blue planet,
Circling her body like a long snake.
I stand at the edge of the Pacific and say the words
As though there is no distinction between dream and instinct
As though I can contain all this wild blue longing
By repeating the names, Russian, Eel, Little River,
Big River, the Navarro, the Albion River.

This Bridge Of Dreams

Only my axe against the ice mouthed pond
Will break the spell of cold and release the water
Waiting just beneath
We are exhaling into sleep
This leaning into dark unfolding
Before us
This is Lady Sarashina’s Bridge Of Dreams
The journey from the land of light
Into that place of polar scrubbed white
Where even the hearts of magnets
Forget their lives of metal
Turning instead to the strange language
Of fire on the horizon of sky
And days that are wed to their endless cycle
Of northern light.
We follow the geese through some strange constellation
Only they know the meaning of
Signs and smells that pull them out
Of such feathered sleep
And slip their forms like soft gray comets
Spinning out into the currents of unknown.
We follow this flight
We are exhaling at the blue hole
We are swimming with night’s ink
Tattooed against all our pores
We are crossing Lady Sarashina’s
Bridge Of Dreams.

Dogs Of Mexico

What was it about the dust
That carved its way into my heart
That spoke the unspeakable words
Of the night
Endless tears that cause the air to stop
That break the stones
That whisper your name
In every bar
That never sleeps
That dances the dance of the newly dead
Who do not yet realize they must cross over
They must leave the taste of dust behind
Forsake this land of eyes and hands
The heat that twists its way into my hair
Has your face
This dream of rain
A flood that gathers me into its arms
These are the dogs of Mexico
This endless roaming pack
That stampedes my heart
Leaves echoes of
A thousand unnamed nights
In your arms.

The Myth Of Lost Places

We're lying on our bellies on the pier above the Bay
The wood tastes like salt or was it summer
Outside the subway station in Brooklyn ?
You were helping an old woman
Pull her grocery cart up the steps,
Twilight was snagging itself
In your hair.
I was painting Cuba at dawn, trying to figure out
How to paint the taste of neon streaks
In the air, and everything existed at once
Yet nothing existed but the tip of my brush
Above the paper.
It was the evening after the moths
Beat wings against our windows laying eggs,
When you started rowing the boat
Out to the island and dropped anchor,
So you could drift, think, and fall asleep,
Dreaming about the gypsy musician who pulled you up
On stage where you danced so hard your
Glasses flew off, like twilight to dawn
Or moths to light,
Soaring above the heads of everyone you ever loved,
Standing in circles of salt inside you,
Blessings from the Black Madonna or the Virgin of Guadalupe
Reunited as a myth of past places once lost
Now found again inside you.

Begin

Her bathing suit is the color of blueberries
In spring
And she is the first to go
The first to give her body to the river
So the river receives her as a gift
Everything says begin here

As she swims, the river opens her body
Wider
So she takes in the color of transparent things
Together, the woman and the water
Form the shape of all beginning places
Form a language only the two of them speak

So that when it is time to go
She pulls her clothes on over
The voice of the river

And in that way they become the language of nature
And spread her word
Bit by bit, as the woman bicycles home
Becoming light in Redwoods