Blog

chaos and waste

in the fields

Know the killers by their words. They use too many, and invert them. They speak a language of chaos to stir confusion. Once frothed to full foment, they descend from their towers to feed and grow fat on the blood of lambs. By morning, they have disappeared to clean themselves and then reappear above the carnage, lamenting. This mess, this mess, they say. For shame, they say, and lob another theory into the crowd, the usual balloons of enhanced security and maximum efficiency. These float on the raised hands of the assembled, who cheer.  The speakers smile, digesting last night’s feast. Tonight, repeat.

Meanwhile, a haggard band of constant shepherds gather under cover of remaining trees, to tremble before the lives remaining, and abide.

astral missives

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.

regard

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.

big top

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.

reading

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.