Camping essentials
Yes, love. Bring what you are.
Keep arriving and we will meet
them and us and you in time,
the world’s children where
we gather in your name, still
singing.
You asked when. It is now.
You will find us by our song.
Come out.
Linguistic loss
Consider the stone in the throat
holding just below the tongue
its long silence waiting to melt
its molten song––that suddenly
slips
to drop
heavy and clanking down
the long ladder of explanation
to the pit.
To the matter of mind
To a mind willing to wait beneath the matter of a living form, who pads her soft solidity at midnight to rest her weight on the chest, these doves will visit sometimes, to coo an edge bathed in moonlight back from the blade of itself.
Into kiln
by a
cold hand
hot light
chasm open
voiceless lips
earned oblivion
poisoned fruit
open wound
immobile fear
red moon
my love
not that
angel us
one
Wanting to breathe
When asked, it is air we want. Birdsong too, but to admit the latter feels like pushing it so let’s start with breath. When not asked, we raise hands to sky. From the bay windows high above us, members of the homeowners association shake their heads. Our pause confirms what someone was just saying about our idle ways. What on earth are we doing if not climbing? We are even slow in our greetings––total inefficiency! This bracing way of clasping both arms at once as though holding against a tipping ship, holding the gaze for balance as we ask, How are you? And in wonder, it is so good to see you here even if we both know the birds are leaving and here hasn’t been so hot for some time. Perhaps especially because we know this, there is wonder. Here we are!
You! We say, and You! We respond even as each also knows how the overlords are doing something with the air––they learn to parcel this in packaged plans through air-conditioned boards. Yes, they will divide this, too. No, they will not take us while we are still so efficiently removed from our next breaths instead and they call our deaths collateral, shaking heads at our parents and the wayward ways that led to our lazy arms reaching above our dazed faces into the not-yet sun we have the gall to dare to know us well enough to draw from memory our shadows beside where we stand and it will not stay––
but for a moment we are painted silhouettes, mighty against the next hill where we stand with our backs in indolent refusal of the million-dollar views, faces aimed again to the next morning as we mourn the way of knowing that comes with knowing we will never be ready but still, missing birdsong, dare to breathe, believing the next day will come
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
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
The practice of weaving
Call it afterlife, our dispossession from what once entwined us in the body of a vast and complete mind for the wholes of the whole of our woven kinds when we still knew the limited range of certain words and the expansiveness of others when we felt them on a breeze. I want to mend this dream back to a time before a given good became the tear in the veil of sky, before the settled weight of a single image bowed the rooves above us against our nightly returns.
Toward another now
At a critical time, the high priests of progress were called in to advise, and it was expected that their minds would point ever forward, that new horizons would be proclaimed sacred and new wine drunk before its time while the sacrifice was made offstage. They did and it was. Aftermaths appeared much later on the new horizon, and eventually the aftermath was now.
On breath
All that matters is–––what? Sometimes I cannot hear.
I want the children to be able to dream and breathe. I want their dreams for them, their breath, their dream breath back to them now, the winds restored where they were knocked out like a blow to the back. Sometimes at a birth a child will need to be reminded to breathe, but this is something else.
Sometimes at the death of children a collective body will need to be reminded back to collective breath.
It knocks now. Let some new wind be what this is, knocking back. Louder now. Everyone I see in passing in a workday says the same thing. I need to breathe we say to one another. A body deprived of oxygen will fade. A soul deprived of body will––what? Are these souls knocking about? Something knocks at my temples now. It will not stop. How are you? I ask the children, an opening ritual. Tired, they say. I am so tired.
These are our children. They are not breathing well.
All that matters is what will restore breath. All that matters is protection of breath, of dream. All that matters is rest for these knocking souls. We try to hold the thought.
Another round fires into the space again where we are trying, looking up, to remember a dream. Its noise pours over us like sand into our mouths.
