amid ongoing hush
we shared real questions in imagined time
meaning everything we made there was
unfinished & blood is no fiction it learns
drop by unsparing bird through intractable
dawns singing feathers shrunk to fit tongues
to then expand to swallow us whole into
carrying we carry on like this & sing
emergence at twilight
hand, palm, open head bowed. it was nothing & we named it believing only hunger teaches how to dream of food never tasted even if the last calorie went to the dreaming then describing to an empty room: let me tell you about the swell of it the shining memory of that exquisite fat greasing fingers lips the smell because if hearing is the last to go there may be someone there still listening even after the death of the all we risked for the never arriving meal by scar upon scar & you kept repairing mine–why–i lived with a man whose pain would cloud then sharpen vision and no one could say which it was in any moment until its aftermath which made it hard to answer simple questions like what is that thinking yes what is that really so i started calling it by unspeakable names meant to apply one day to some constant beginning like the way you taught me to say jacaranda to the purple that waved where we walked in the ordinary reverence of Tuesday late afternoons where in your skin i am smuggled from judgement to awe
ache
i wanted to offer once upon you
i wanted to give you time
of which you were always saying
i don’t know where it went
now
there is a city on fire, and
there the burn scar, and
there the wild white sun again
eating the distance between
dream and despair and
it is the smell of you i miss
now
when i leave, afraid you
will wander off, walking
into the flames to see their
dancing because it really
is so much more up close
than what any aerial view
can tell you or high budget
film they miss the terrible
now
grace of those licking tongues
you can only see this when
they are right outside the
window-wall, with only
the glass between you
for now i wanted for you
an hour you could not
lose like your keys
your glasses the moment
we were almost inside
now
i lost it, too, waiting
like come here and
after a certain point
getting out is no longer
an option so you watch
the flames through the
glass knowing that if
it were the glass of another
time it would have shattered
by now but not knowing how
long this new stuff will hold
out
afters
when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped
& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only
took up song again, with all words
wronged
upright, back braced, throwing
notes
to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond
meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch
she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone
from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond
the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,
becoming something else, enough
light to make shade
like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch
each branch like a river she knew
when him once
before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost
song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird
to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry
from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore
to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.
a meeting with the emperor
please don’t put the new fortress there, said the old woman to the emperor. remember what happened to the last one?
he picked her up, spun her around, smiled. he sang a happy song about self-love.
it’s going to burn, she said. she lived in a tiny hut near the well. she was calm and very polite. she made no mention of his nakedness.
you are so wise! he said, laughing, and your eyes! wow, are those wells, too?
then he assured her not to worry. he had the best of intentions and these were the opposite of burning. all good! he sang, spinning off.
later, when the blaze ate the hillside and everyone on it, including the old woman’s hut, he cried, SEND SOMEONE! HELP!
o god, he whispered, after the shouting.
but by the point, even the helicopters had to retreat. the woman near the well was silent.
an everyday tragedy
i watched the small gods of the would-be hero’s mirror world tie him down to be devoured. he took it for a feast in his honor.
terrified of being, he chained himself to the mountain he confused for his own image and became the vulture to eat his own flesh every night. he never thought to imagine a fire there for the taking. he had to see himself its maker. he had to steal.
he thought he was the sun and the rain, the harvest and the shade, but we knew him as the storm, and its wreck. when asked why, he said only “I….” and blew wind.
knowing was outside him, looking on, but knocked too soon. as often happens when a would be hearer lives in the maze of his mirror-world, the answer came too late.
in retreat
with weakness ever infinite,
surrender is always possible,
even likely.
better to the tree than the crowd,
better to the force of gravity than
the heights of a fool, professing––
anything.
out there, in the beyond, there
is a tree and she holds up the
sky
you can walk to her, extend a foot
to a branch and let her
hold you
suspended, then breathe and look.
how much better this offering
than another needless
sacrifice? you can
stay awhile. you may need to.
let the crowd and the fools
hold forth with the sole of
your foot facing sky
let your head remain grounded
beneath her shade. Extend
a hand, return.
re: undelivered message
What I came here for was a thing for the moment. Ancient and entirely present.
Ready? You called, with so much enthusiasm, I thought you understood.
You know? I called back, amazed. Now retrace the original sin.
I do know! you shouted, and Now is the time! I took your slogans for sincerity. That was a long time ago. Now you repeat yourself. Sure, there’s a wolf somewhere, but when?
You don’t know time. We joke that you are it, given the terms of your world. In which you are all but your saving and still the sun. No other imaginable constant, and so not ready when the real one comes.
I am not sure to what extent the joke is mutual, but laughter is a means of survival in transit. Destination? Return to sender, we suppose. I have nowhere else I was planning to go. But here––
Okay, if you want, I say. Be louder. Wear more feathers. I don’t know what you think you are doing with any of that but they say it works somewhere.
Many love it––you constantly remind me, and anyone listening, of this truth. Your sacred red herring.
Go ahead. Offer it up again and again. Confess without words, how you love how they love it, even as they hold the alternative like a knife to your throat.
I don’t want to lead you into a frightening place, you smile. And wink, for the camera, again. Recasting illness as forbidden fruit, infestation as the alluring dragon guarding your treasures, your gilded selves.
What does an old bird say to something like this? With a sigh I assure you, I am not afraid. But for you.
You can lead a horse to water but there’s nothing to do for the one who keeps sending the cart far ahead of himself and away from her banks, to collect.
Okay then, friend. Carry on. It is easy to misread a moment. There is enough here to distract you from presence, and in a moment, I go, to carry back with me an awareness that most of yourselves will never know.
somewhere, meaning
Start with want.
Begin with impatience, the stuck breath of what to say when everyone is always interrupting, holding forth.
Start with fever.
Begin with syntax as the opposite of cultivated rows of well-behaved lines, to swing the screeching monkey mind between vining ellipses.
Start with eruption of doggerel in perfect union with the fervent bloom of heart’s first blood, and with the last. Of everything. Start with everything at once, all at one time.
Begin as a reader. Begin with a piercing sense of fundamental unworthiness. Then say the word.
Start intending to get a closer look at the many-legged creature sliming under the rock you take to be your soul. Start naming the insects teeming in the soul, and the slime you mistook for a separate matter.
Begin with the end in mind––no, not your ends. The end. Begin with questions, like how many legs? And what is the taste of this monster’s spool?
Start with what may kill you and then get past it. Resist thinking this makes you stronger than those who start with what may kill you and then get nowhere. Notice how everywhere you get; you break open into more pieces. Break. Dance.
Begin building the opposite of a fortress. Start with rubble. With commitment and patience, one day you may evolve into an underwater wreck. Stick with it, and one day you will become the sand of an abandoned beach.
I mean.
Start with revision. Of the material as they have been presented to you, by all who meant you well, or ill. Start by revising the known story.
Begin against logic, against all reasonable arguments for some better thing. In hope and without any.
I mean.
You can begin with an attempt to explain, if you must. But that one, I think, is overrated. So little of this what will submit to explanation, anyway. Plenty of people get off on the idea of fitting saddles onto flying dragons, but some prefer dragons in their wildest states, breathing fire against any demands to explain themselves.
Start with putting a bucket to catch the drops from a leaking roof, or you can start on the roof–– or if you are really motivated, you can remove the roof. There are many ways to stop a leak, but none to stop the leaking of the world from the containers we try to make for it.
Begin with an admission. I am such a small container, and the world is leaking from me.
I mean.
Begin in darkness, deaf, and dumb as bedrock, mute as the whale as she appears to the climber who cannot hear her singing.
driving beyond destinations
Greybeards cried over end times, but we had already heard a thousand stories of their decimated faith in old books. They remembered birds and beliefs, jungles of lapis blue wings and shelter in canopies of atmosphere, but we had drunk the cartoon blood of salesmen since birth. When it was time to leave, the stink of bodies stuck as we drove west. Power lines drooped a listless watch over dirt lots past signs for Jesus and ATV repairs, fencing miles of chain link. Homes peeled their skins, molting in time with the swing sets and plastic kiddie pools in yards with no children in sight. There were amphibian carcasses and state-prison boomtowns, scrappy sands and chaparral, freight trains snaking through the lowest-down place, through the hottest on record, the world’s tallest flagpole and the largest non-captive reptile ever witnessed, dead in the middle of the road. A mountain bled hearts of paint into the bombing range where plywood signs announced the coming of the last free place. It was cooperation month at the Home of the Jaguars and a Now Open sign at the Cattle Call rodeo dwarfed the elk across the street. Storage was three months free and senior centers waved like sunset pastures while aloe blades took arms against a sea of tumbleweed, rangers looting cash for anybody’s home. Exit here to eat, and we sped our eternal retreat from creatures in suspended animation––T-Rex, mustang, sloth––rusting in space to mock time. Have you seen these? It’s not a metaphor, someone made them to go with the land, each in life-sized mythic proportions. Meanwhile, trains processed a funeral formation from the gypsum plant. ATVs headed to the dunes. Tony from his diner stretched Come Inn cartoon hands, all caps. We would not stop, we swore in silence––not for bags of orange or avocado, not for the super lotto, the loose slots, or the triple live nudes, not for the antique malls, our lives. We dropped over the pass in a riptide of cars, unwilling to pause and unable to leave. Tracing taillights, we colored a sea we meant to reach a place where the ink of dreams spilled into the manifests. Our destiny these miles of surface reflections, unknowable deep. Now cruises come and go from the ports among barking seals touting two-for-one whale watching and we wonder, two whales for one price or two watches for one untold number of whales? Then the beachfront tent cities in the shadows near the cliffs. Behind the fish packing plant, men on bikes haul loads between camps, past children in fountains beneath gulls and Chinooks, banner ads for beer and Cheetahs and Crayola-bright kites, we count butterfly, plane, superheroes beneath the shock and awe of midday sun and every other star another death at high noon, invisible against this postcard blue. Our desert dust still clinging in each crevice, we find cover for the forms we still dare carry, here on these benches near the water somersaulting into memories we call wonder never death and then come questions. First among these is who will wash you now?
*
This piece first appeared in Issue Twelve of Fine Print Press, April 2023
