Tangled Roots Writing

This poem of mine, published in Sierra Nevada Review a few years ago, was one of the funnest to write, and always gets a visceral response from its readers.  What does it say to you?

Tamsen Donner Commits Horrid Acts with Her Husband

“…the cabins, by order of Major Swords, were fired, and with them everything connected with this horrid and melancholy tragedy were consumed…” 

-          Edwin Bryant, with the Eastward-bound army

after conquering California, 1847

The tent, canvas from the wagon,

a pebbly texture sagging with ice, crackling

in the cold night air.

Wind’s monologue. Dead-cold trees.

From within,

Tamsen and her dying husband

watched the layer of canvas

fearing its failure,

the loss of that distinction

between inside and outside.

Storms lasted ten days at a time. 

Starving so,

bones show through

into a new shape of the person.

Now the body is the shape of what’s inside.

After he died,

she stroked his body, the bones

and the tendons like wrapping twine

around his femur,

his radius and ulna.

She dressed him. Then

she undressed him

to use his clothing to warm herself. 

He lay naked, under a threadbare quilt

(midwest quilting socials, bills sewn

into the squares,

that hope like

scent of freshly cut grass).

She removed the blanket and

wrapped herself in it,

gazing and not

gazing.  Was she still

the woman who married him? 

Was he

in death,

the man she married?  

Tamsen licked his wrist, remembering.

She used her teeth,

as when he used to bite

little purple marks into her neck.

She nibbled along

the inside of his arm - she felt most familiar

with this part of him, what was visible

as he worked,

what touched her

when he held her face

to kiss her.  Most familiar

and most proprietary. 

A penknife was all that was needed

here to slice out a piece

like the curve of pink melon from its rind. 

The axe was used later

maybe, to cut  

the bones. Her tongue

ran across the inside

of the inside of his arm. 

Its damp baby-pink

surprising beneath the brown

paper bag skin

as if here

was the man she married.  Here

was the untouched

part.  She savored

the hope of him,

in the hard white desert of winter -

his release from the packaging of his body,

and for her, a surrender

to the inside, the outside layers collapsing

inwards, heavy

tent walls sagging.

Silence pressed

upon her. She chewed slowly

to make him last, the soft

pink arm, her eyes closed

in pleasure.