Living in several places at once
between time and the rain, our names
would escape us and the rain none can know
to find the embers of a memory doused in the rain
glowing in the winds and our faces where we let it come.
Flushed
Torrent.
Category: earthling
The Skins of Words
And the reach.
What desperate ecology makes possible what will to be done between humans unto and for each imagined soul. The massive width of this creature, what is it? That would eat its own. Fight long enough and some bond is forged. Of what? What god is defeated here only to find another solitary rebirth, untended in the wilds of a bombed-out house of worship? The ancient scream begins again, as though to tire the mind of its presumptions of fire, its thick overgrowth ever ready to ignite. The distance between in and out of this place as thin as skin. How dare anyone still contained think to speak for a trembling fragility so infinitely fused to these light dappled nerves, the terrible brilliance of insistent renewal. Poses the one at the page naked but for words and yet reaching.
On Expected Answers
To questions of when and what next.
The language of the given form needs no translation when dancing. But this limping, dogged continuance is harder to explain. The strange grammar of this body’s history belies her best attempts to assimilate into a now where acknowledgement of injury is cast as frivolous grievance, in the land of perpetual make-believe where the static expectation is always a willingness to play, to forge ahead, and plan for the next big thing, as though this could not possibly a cessation of all things for a period of perfect grief.
Hot Mess
Heart on display.
How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––
to give me away
like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––
like she is eager to give me away
to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!
And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.
And I hear.
Revolutions of Form
Being in the meantime. Now.
It is dark except for the low light of the lamp, and something rumbles nearby, in a fissure between seen and unseen. Then a screeching note, followed by wingbeat near the window across from where I sit. Noting how I dreamed again of you in trouble, and me trying to get somewhere in time. But where. Like so many of these dreams, I can only describe its geography as an urgent atmosphere of too-bright light, noisy with crowds and a sense of executioners above us. As I run to find you, there is a scope somewhere, a running form in its crosshairs, and the crowds are rivers of us, and for each other body in the crosshairs I am part of the crowd in the desperate dream where we feel the insignificance of this flesh against the thing we mean to prevent in time.
And what do I do now with this sense, but sit and spin in it, in these fifteen––no, ten––minutes before I have to move again, out again to where the screeching flies, to the place of urgent details and not enough time? I note again the feeble voice crying stop, how it sounds like one that started crying a long time ago, long enough to lose the urgency of the initial scream, near expired like the droning whine of an infant soon to fall exhausted back to sleep.
Night Miles
Unsounded alarm.
Child, what should I know to save you that I do not know? – Jorie Graham
No, the storm is not mine, or the melt after. This broken skin, maybe, shedding itself away. This cough. What yelps, shambling on this road somewhere behind me, out of sight, for which I may be the shambling creature just ahead?
Wake
“Pity the monsters.” – Robert Lowell
How many dawns will continue to meet us, from which we might pivot to pity the monsters, from certain death to recognition of these fleeting selves as mere specks within a single monster’s eye?
***
“Pity the monsters” comes from Robert Lowell’s poem “Florence.”
Updrafting
With music.
Why this song now, ribboning its shining ascent?
The atmospheric river of it, its attendant wind.
How still a body becomes when carried.
Party Crasher
When now comes unannounced.
Her roar cut first, between our voices.
Glass broke.
The ocean was bringing demands.
We did not feel ourselves ready to hear these,
but they were not going to wait.
Time Being
In language.
What tongue I may have inherited has long since dissolved upon landing. So now the constant challenge is naming while conjugating past and present at once. To walk naked into this astonishing force, a mind not mine from which I am nevertheless breathed among all others––this congregation of dreams, any number of which may condense under pressure, returning to rain a new forecast.