Some Past Thoughts

all of these thoughts have passed through me already

like " i love a blank page" and "i find a photograph of a girl holding the decomposed leg of a deer in a book as i am weeding, i think, 'why don't i keep that, so that i can remember death, and i can also see the beauty of the deer bone and hoof'; but then i reconsider, thinking 'it is blasphemous, the way she holds it, like it is a science experiment, that deer ought to be decomposing into the earth, that deer leg should not be touched, but allowed rest, after having run so many miles' " and "what happens to old books when they die, sometimes they are not even read, and the pages are falling out already, other times they have been read so many times that there are stains, rips, fading, yellowing, whole sections falling out, bends and frays, tiny ripples, globs of glue where they were repaired, tape, dust jackets missing, creases on the spine, but no matter, i still need to recycle them, and always there are more, ephemera all, where the old books go" and

I make a soup
crush herbs grown in my garden
a soup to soothe
a soup that is medicine
I clean my halls
the halls of my ancestors
I wash my body
hills and hollows
hallowed ground