Blue as in Spruce

Show me what you took
with you when you left.
We were told to keep
a list by the door, a bag,

to use the time between
the warning and event
to fill it with the things,
we thought, in the before

times, we could not live
without. Begin with shoes,
they said, and draw lines
out from there. Maybe

it helps to know this:
I was looking at a tin-
type photo of you, eyes
lenses arranged for a lens,

lines meeting. I thought
I could not live without
the metal feel in my palm.
Count this among things

I didn't know. Count
things of which you are
sure. I was looking
at ants battling to the death

over their galaxy, a scrap
in a field behind a house
we paid the bank to live
inside for twenty seven

years. A line of blue ever-
greens, balding and bent
against gusts, fling needles
softer than salt, than glass,

to the ground around
their trunks. Begin with
shoes, and from there draw
nothing but breath.

Crop

Between a sea
of leaves

and an inland
sea, wind

canyons press
dresses

against the legs
of women,

a mantra-made
wind saying

Tired. See
how the city

dissolves into
a sea of debris,

itself becoming
one with debris

funneled up
into the sky

then dropped
on the crops,

silvery fish-
shaped leaves,

then dropped
into the lake

on the ale-
wives, tired

of fighting
the current.

Carolyn Guinzio's most recent publications are A Vertigo Book, winner of The Tenth Gate Prize and the Foreword Indies Award for Poetry Book of the Year and the sequence Meanwhile in Arkansas, winner of the Quarterly West Chapbook Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry and many other journals. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com