Category: poetry

Butterfly Wings Over Time

Now weather

how long have these tongues been training, gathering miles in this march?
all sinew and song now, seeding a note long overdue, stitched in the scars
of familial bones, now wind at broken backs where you fire at newborn ghosts

haunted by the children of the children you meant to unwrite but their names
were in the same hand as the first word and rhyme in this abundant night
now shining and porous with our open mouths the gates of a dream released

from these feet to our leaning crowns in the sight of what above your drones
past snipers’ tired talk of empty rights by which you vented brutal might this now when our huddled mass finds home in no-man’s-land of common exile

what horse for what discordant era now rides your conquest in reverse
what young hearts, annexed to your butchered beliefs beat back the boots
in which you shake behind armor to magnify your haunt without relief

lost pilgrim, it is time to take off your boots, unmask your eyes and stop,
unstop your ears for there is enough salt in our tears, enough light, to return
you to the land you lost yourself from when you rode off to claim the lot

no pilgrim, there will be no rest for these ghosts that haunt you for the land
so long watered by the slaughter of your making now becomes a rising spring
of remembrance in these open hands inviting your first word back to singing

by first light

The Fastening

Of elements.

Beneath waving drapes of midnight, these lines
draw us out in the swell where the first caught hook
leaves the longest scar. No, love. You cannot go
back but to the opening or you lose it all to danger
us in this work of finding what the cynic masks
until mourning song against memory’s loss, by
turning heads to the young at the breast to owl
until we catch ourselves on trees. No we are not
birds we must ask for song first also love and
what comes suggests we are light, lighting
the eye back to her first sound and the shine
that preceded too the open mouth that
meant the beginning of you.

Ancestral Flight

And skeletal remains

Considering the stars that are absent in daytime
it is not so strange to find unknown bodies who
unbidden but abiding, come––and the question
of avian flight, its beginnings: from tree-limbs
down or from ground up? The climbers between
branches or the crawlers into them when the front
pair of four limbs become propellers, then wings.
One of the dancers compared her stirring limbs
to the scream against the skeleton that might
become in confinement a gnarled tree. Only
the bird displays a wishbone, that peaking bow
to scissor stratospheric weave and from her history
this question about what is possible before
there are harbors for safe landing of a body

with a head full of sky

Singer to her Song

From a chasm

When the gods of the golden wars are done
pruning the immortal siege of us I hope to still
call after some bird of the unseen, come, I will
feed you through the yawning lull of an entire
day the wonder of its grace long taboo, a sin
hidden in shadows of imperial gaze, amid
the absolution of the drones, the least among
us long translated to the lesser of two knowns
a third way buried in the blast still calls with
breaking voice Time says to me, o Space I fast
become a body petrified in my eternity and I
admit I am a vapor now, the scent of displaced
selves nosing tracks along scorched earth we fell
to track this body back to knowing you before

that severed joint

To Say the Word

In time.

What bears the clock’s repeating to fold a blanket again, soft on the back of the chair where yours just was, what names the length of time to your return? I was and I remember once collecting names and meaning it my mission to hold every noun of a single tongue. I wrote them one by one on cards. How young then with so little time for waiting. Did the project last a year, three weeks, a day? Not until I ran out of cards, I can tell you but you can say I am still at it, minus the cards, minus the gathering––and I’ve slowed. I spend so much more time repeating, turning over the few I have: tongue, memory, hand, fold. Collection, I––You. What bears the name’s repeating, to fold its vowels between lips and hold them as if to absorb a promise till it takes. What names the way a body learns that name is just the first sound of the word that holds the door open for a moment where the flesh of form may enter folding body over threshold to bear time by letting go to gather names as leaves of leavings and the word was to begin and the what was folded wing and when it opened it revealed a new name for the next place not yet known–– I go

Dream Melt

From the last ice age.

the imagination is where it rains paint onto frescoes
of figures to crowd the divine comedy clubs where we
come and go every evening, no ID, no cover at the door

carrying our huddled masses of memory on backs
crunching shells of peanuts and empires on the floor
the strobe light pulsars keeping time with unborn stars

first wears the crown––it is the chicken or the egg,
but who can say is on the mic now, to proclaim
in a language unknown to whomever has ears

no tears need translation and what is the time?
it is lost and what is the point? only a moment
and where did it begin? in the beginning

was the word and the word rained down where
we gathered here to catch it back to the mouths
of us speaking all at once in the land where

the constant rain is coming
from the vision at the bottom
of the iceberg where it

melts

To Move the Stone

Into light.

Like the fine dust of the nearest moon,
its footprints to prove that even stone carries
within its stubborn mass the key to lightness.

Like the magnetic field that holds it upright
spinning days and nights against its body.
These sudden leaps against its weight––
these secrets that will not be summoned
––only met.

As the bird and not the feather, unseen
amid glare and muted by noise––nested
by the patient weavers’ nets of threads
to catch the fallen nothings where they
float––

As masked dancers beneath surveillance
states, limbs stretched against compressed
space to tread the arcing thread taut
between the spikes of barbed gates––

And soaring, inside the empty vessel
of my cupped hands lifting
where I reached them up to you
to catch me back, the waters
of this heavy form.

Reflections in Water

And the telling, slant.

My favorite detail about Perseus other than his winged horse has to do with the delicacy with which he handled that severed Gorgon head, taking care not to scratch or rough the head by grainy sands, how he thought to place it on a bed of leaves, then sea plants, how this act birthed coral. 

I am reminded by Calvino, who in an age for questioning the fate of books, considered a related question of weight, and made a case for lightness. Only the reflected image allows for the presentation of what may be revealed only indirectly.

I am reminded by Moses, pleading let me see your face to God on the mountain, and God like, no but here is my backside and no doubt the frisson of such an encounter with the hind-parts of divinity is the highest achievement of any art.

How else does a winged horse emerge from Gorgon blood? By what other arrangement but such delicacy can the stomp of a single hoof draw water from stone and invite muses to drink? Where they gather to admire the horse, its beautiful wings.

Always wings, always the mountaintop. The nearness to sky, to flight. The weight of being is weight enough. Only the image––or better, song––can pulse across space, soaring.

I hope so. Let us not, before it comes, be crushed the accumulated weight of the dust of ourselves rubbled in the making and unmaking empires, those heaviest of forms.

***

Notes while reading the opening of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Language of Inquiry

With Lynn Hejinian.

You disbelieved both borders and endings, knew a word to be something bottomless that drew you in. In one dream, you would write a single long sentence in a day, uninterrupted on a thread of rolled paper, chasing thought down the pier with your thinking hand, its bride. By your constant attention on the grace of shadows, you kept your world lit. Those who knew your light were restored by its nourishment. They found something in its playful dance that made it possible to return, even in the days of death, to the living.

***

Inspired and with collected lines from Remembering Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024) in The Paris Review, which came out in the wake of the poet’s death in late February.