Month: August 2024

Against the Sirens

The telling

Tell me about it, we say, nodding at the most recent lament before us––in the chair, at the table, with the tired voice; in passing in the wild rush. Tell me, we repeat, like shaking a clean sheet to fold it before stacking with the others, who whisper in chorus at this gesture and its countless kin, constantly throughout each day, a plea for a home not quite remembered or fully left. Tell me about it. Tell me about that place I can always remember, ever almost. Whisper to me of this collective hush again, what I need to hear against the sirens.

What, Counting

in this space before what goes

In this time among these machines that want nothing, that take and absorb the images and sounds and other residues of our lives, their harvest, I want. But am so often dulled among their droning that I may not name it. 

What, then? Has that been also reaped? I am counting before it goes, wanting to say. Something but the taint of those scythes is in the words, too.

Let us count before we go, some other way. The machine will not know to measure waiting by the heartbeat, ear pressed to beloved chest, the rasp of final breaths or by the caw-caw-caw across the sky outside this window in the still of midafternoon, above and beyond the droning, beeping whirr of them, indifferent to the stretched stillness, pulled taut until the next caws back. 

Keepers

After Jorge Luis Borges

You forking paths, tongued by seekers
who pose over volumes, boring into our flesh
read the sins of fathers in our pages, see
me a harlot waiting to happen, a hope unleashed
are binding us––feet, knees, waists, necks
you stitch the skins of us tight, fisting the pages
certain you know what you’ve read, certain
you know us, that we may unleash what dreams
may come to the unfettered flesh, unbound, to
understand the soft-footed silence, treading near
my unshed pages saved from the burn, awaiting
language to make ourselves into all that you fear will––
?

*
The first word in each line comes from a sentence in Andrew Hurley’s translation of Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” (“You who read me, are you certain you may understand my language?”).

Okay, day

Onward

Not every boon blooms from discovery of that magic elixir, except where coffee is concerned. Most are patched together from dryer lint and mended hems and insufficient bites of apple in the car and the dizzy-sick of last night’s back-to-school sleeplessness as the next sun sets. It was a good day, Mom, says Babygirl, well past the afternoon tears. I am a mess, she says. I hose her off laughing in the dark and leave the rest of the mess in the car, set the alarm, hoping to sleep soon. In a few hours I am up again, straight to the coffee pot, with food to the cat in the morning dark, saying Okay. Okay, day. Okay.

Echo

In an aftermath

Maybe what lasts after endings is this
wind as song stripped of technique
bells as sound of fallen leaves, light
a riot of color, firing life–––––––
and stars as receivers who curve
long necks of shine to hear each
prayer in context at a distance
to reveal how this planet for now
at any given moment still pulses
with these voices of us reminding
us please–– and dear–– and help––
beyond the beyonds of this all.

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