Swamps

Seventeen
the night I parked my hand-me-down
Chevy on the gravel road
miles from the closed signs
decorating the windows
of the shops in town

stripped naked in the headlights
and ran
until the rocks and frozen corn stalks
bloodied my feet.

A baptism of
gray breath and snow
on the plains that made me
a woman.

Twenty-
three years a woman
when the mountains made me a poet.

Bummed cigarettes
and narratives
from boys with long hair
and girls with big muscles

blunt bangs and a coolness
dissolving with the youth
’round the corners
of my eyes.

Just shy of thirty,
those poems
-feasting, rotting
on the river bottom-

unravel downstream,
arrive seconds, lifetimes
before the universe explodes
as a slow trickle
a Gulf-like rupture

in the swamp that makes me
a mother.