of vegetal being
I still know nothing
but consider the heart
as flower, as door;
flower as carrier
from earth to sky;
each stem a work
in translation,
rooted in an original
story, evolving, the
heart of which,
branching into
constant revision,
continues to echo:
this is how,
becoming.
between elsewhere
Where to, next? but the boatman will not tell.
Only leap, he says, between the boats
as we sail in the space between channels,
coursing code of signals woven in these waters,
currents of carpet filigreed with figures
of vegetal dream, scented with musk
of mane and canine teeth, tail and tender
breath of newborn skin; down of butterfly
catching red of griffin’s eye, shouting call back!
against flicker of torches painting membrane
of cave wall; trembling hand over womb,
magnetic storm lunges us into the slipstream
of tongues after Babel’s last breath and look
another shouts, look! We are arriving! now.
and the measure of art
Anything made in this space can neither reflect or embody the life it leans into, but may at best assemble images as instruments with voices of the dead, their players. Unknown concerts happen all the time, keeping time with each tree falling unheard in the distant forest. Now in the shaded alleyway, now at the bus stop, in the basement, the interior of an economy car in a strip mall parking lot. Is it that we cannot help ourselves, making what would call them out? It seems more likely that we would be paved easily enough by asphalt, by overwork, hunger, stress––and forget. I suspect it is the dead who can’t help themselves, reaching back to touch what lives the way we might have touched old photographs in another time, when there seemed more of it. To recollect by offering back the longing notes of these images, their edges sharpened to cut whatever they touch, to make it stranger, as a reminder: you do not know what this is. You do not know what you are.
beneath wing
What but hurt can teach
the proper handling
of injured parts?
Only lavish care,
abiding.
What can measure
what reaches beyond
reason? A single breath
may not be enough
to contain this volume,
and yet–––I cannot
while living keep
from the next.
Yes, come in.
Come in.
no feathers
The sky leans over, close enough to spill. A blurred sun squints some admonition in hush beyond language, near breath.
spectacle, witness, aftermath
The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.
They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.
My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.
My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week.
She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched.
Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end.
They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.
signs in a year of strange weather
Eventually a road sign may tell you,
here is where it ends. You watch for it,
a reason for the spin to stop––driving
without destination just to get out
the freeze in the cooler packed before
dawn.
Bare back beneath shower spray,
tender beneath hands a bare hope
suffusing talk of what will
come when the numbers
hit, when one day
waiting––a future makes sense
like renovation blueprints
in home restoration shows
following mouse droppings
and mildew to magnificent views
––of the lake, the trampoline,
the long yard, the car, fire pit.
Circle us. No more staring
at the map
like it will explain how
to go from wet wood to flame
hot enough to roast wedding pig.
No more extra shots
of gas station caffeine, extra sweet
––first hit of a story where it all works
out in the end.
No more pretending interest
in craps table logic of six and eight;
fish and bait, how bass come
for worms if you grow them;
no more growing worms in yards
as food for fish approaching feasts
here where the next meal
is so much closer now
to the last.
and branch
Starlight scatters wound flint paths of old songs to remember scales in rain.
in flight
As the babies lost their cries,
keening women gathered them
to chests to gallop them over hills
past the shadowed valley,
snipers at the gates.
What else would a dragon keep
but these? Against theft
of treasures it could not
know the golden virgins:
the pose of the hour
was vigilance
against the useless piles,
and it curled at our ankles,
holding us to their warnings
against loss.
Eyes of every witness burned
and through tiny speakers
in our ears, the guards at the gate
said go home; the curators
of spectacle insisted, there’s nothing
and only the crazy and the sentenced
kept on and the angels at the floor
with the mops, and the dead.
Open casket equals open door
to enter the theater of mourning
then came hawks and the hawkers
went the blind mice Now run,
someone said, and we did then
the farmer’s wife.
Admission was free to the public,
see how they––
History was removed by the surgeons.
They held efficient needles to our lips,
we were the crimes against their progress
to be sentenced, but our eyes were burning
from the gas, and our faces wet
you fell three times
along the road
and we with you
even now
the guards feared.
*
From Flight Songs
of lead
Bird, sing into this place for the weight of what remains, for I mean to shelter what may not be saved.
