Month: January 2024

Invocation

Notes from another war.

What I meant to say was not what I said. But this: If death is certain, only timing unknown, will you wait for me where you are living, for I do not know what I am. Here where a child starts a sentence “When I was young . . .” and he is nine. Here where grass is fried in oil until the grass is gone and surgery happens by the light of cell phones.  How fragile, these bodies. In the rubble, you see a hand, reach for it. But where is the rest.

What I meant to say was not what I said, but this. If we met on the shore where I keep vigil, would you know me? Could we sing? Could we continue then, against the fire whose fuel is men and stones, women and children, water and the flesh of my flesh? Would we?

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.

Dear Poet

On this dreaming.

You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.

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.

Tickets, Please

The cost of admission.

You asked about colleges attended, your hulking mass above us, blocking the light. We knew the move for what it was, a banal violence. Hello, wolf, we thought, noting the borrowed sheepskins. How many others had used it to move us from the pits where we waited for the musicians, our kin, to begin? Tickets please. Tickets. The announcement punctuated by the swing of some blunt instrument pulled from a holster at the hip. And on the train where we rode to visit our mother who was dying for lack of credentials to prove she was worthy of the care needed to live. Tickets, please.

When you asked me about colleges attended, I was seated among others on the ground. We were sharing blankets. Many of us were children, some old enough to have acne; others to have the scars of acne and miscellaneous burns; still others had creaking bones and the tired eyes of the old. When you came to ask me for university credentials––tickets, please––you did not notice. How we had removed our shoes, each of us, recognizing holy ground. This was our school where we sat in the dirt on shared blankets at the feet of dead poets.

It is impossible to argue the exile from certain states of being, but we knew to listen for the music of a torquing tongue arched at just the right angle to halt the bone-crunching gears. It was only a moment, but it was long enough to notice the sound for what it was when it resumed. Your question, too. And we laughed with the ghosts when you left us, and went back to school, and you continued to mutter under your breath about the ignorance of some people, and we waved.

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