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Veiled Life in Five Acts

For Ophelia.

It was said of the jailer’s daughter that she sought the flood, that she might be saved by the man who came calling, before she returned in her trembling weakness to the river to sing a song whose words she mostly forgot. 

No, it was not deliberate, her fall from the branch of the willow where she sat. Neither was it abrupt, after long schooling in the art of locking her in, to study what will shapeshift and erupt in the steam of her laughter over the prize they would have lauded her for becoming, if she kept on. With these men who cry at her breast while wondering what to do with themselves. To be? Or not? Me? 

A mind unbalanced by grief, her physician decreed––for the father, no doubt, they declared. Or Laertes on his high horse, tossing advice to the ground, or Hamlet so eager to seed her that he burst into her space, who then complained it would not cost her a groaning to take off his edge, his constant edge. 

And always the question of what to do with it but remind her back to his need, singing? 

And he sings. O sister when I come to knock at your door, may you be no stranger to knowing where the cuts are meant to happen. To her, but for himself: O sister, o daughter, o mother, o wife––it is your breath, your blood, your only life.

Milk Witch

Between blooms.

Words on one side, none on another;
between them, secret smiles, a tolerance
for pain and the nights of long dreams
fire chasing what is caught in the high wind
of the binding gut-level blindness
of spent battery. Scent of lion’s teeth,
the soft, yellow heads, weeding their refusal
to be declared the natural collateral
of another hungry idea seeded by the flying man
in dreams of immortality. What grows here
always flies to its fall and what is fallen
will be consumed beyond its given name
turning the defiant shine of resting face
from the hungry tongues, declaring
at last a body beyond words, back
to an original mouth.

Scattered

To collect them.

Like a lost memory, this dawn reaches for day but does not make it. Not on the tip of the almost-naming mother tongue, but not attempted, with no other reaching back. For this cold egg, unable to hatch, too late arrives too soon. All around here, there is so much else to do. But name it.  Lost memory, reach us remembering back. With the presence. Of mind to forget the sleek. Driving idea, its compelling speed. These are children. To mourn.

Into March

Against the cessation of stops.

To see the shining belly of a gaze, hungry,
we warm to it because it looks like relief
from another madness, a way to peel
the clocks to feel the membrane of each
hour’s sections cool against tongues,
nectaring the Eden we missed, minutes
running off our chins from the body
of Time, our subsistence rations
after nothing of that space or any place
could reach us singing any––more,
though she tried, calling with an offer.

Birds and Our Windows

But where do the children play?

Sound bites fly in on the drive home and spend the night flying around. O god, a young woman says, there is no one left. O god, o god, she says. They are killing us all. Then birds against the glass of the dream window and children kicking, flushed, and fevered in their moving beds. We are moving, but where? Everywhere you can see the overgrowth of mechanic replication stretching its tentacles to our throats. The children will tell you. Ask them how they are, and they will tell you. I am tired. I am so tired, they say. The officials respond: we have more! So much more. The children are not sure about the water. There are rumors of lead. Of runoff. Human waste. They are sure, if you ask them to elaborate, that there is probably a camera somewhere recording them, making a weapon of their faces, their voices, to be turned against them at a future time, yet undetermined. This morning one cries quietly under his hood. I do what I can to keep the cameras from him. The sirens continue, the blast of alarms calling time. Officials reach measuring sticks and probes toward the bodies of the children. The children are backing away. Official talk revolves around the question of reaching them. Ways to bypass their resistance. In this world where the machine winds its algorithmic fingers toward their necks and birds crash against windows where the children are tired, I cannot help. Hoping. They are learning, I want to believe. To resist. But what? And how? They do not say what, not yet. They do not say how. I offer only words, poems. Music, metaphors. Try this? Or this one? I do not know what passes through. We continue, for now. Some of us, then fewer over time. How are you? We ask. And answer, so tired. 

Gymnastic Grammars

Language in liminal space.

If you look hard, it is a process
of falling from a tear in the sky
where the fist of a new star
broke night into some arrival
to tumble down
a spiral staircase
of syllables, dispossessed
and never thinking to own––
not the looking, not the sight
of any of it, not the words,
not the threaded gravities
tugging its light
into them.

Barometer Prayer

After Mahmoud Darwish.

Let me be the bewildered self, the balloon of me in the wind, in vertigo, shaking, the air too thin. If you are not a rain, my love––but how sudden when you come––be a tree. I see you, sky, the sudden heat. If you are not my bewildered self–– o friend, the tether thinning, the weight of me already not enough. If my soul dismounts to walk beside me––friend, the blood of gums now on my tongue, my teeth, before you. On the verge of dawn, at the sight of siege, the alarms, the morning dove––o tree, if my soul in dread of waking against the fuzzed tongue of night should sleep instead, restore my sorrow back to this bewildered self that I may be with you again on the verge of a dawn about to rain.

***

Written in conversation with Mahmoud Darwish’s A State of Siege.

Orchestral Notes

From the pit.

What hungry mouth still stirs here at the breast of its bloody becoming, to scratch light from the surface of a longing night? Another winged man at a precipice, weight of the albatross discarded from the neck in favor of stolen flight.

What passes through the bent arch of towering bridge between shores, each with a resident watchkeeper long decided too mad for words––who has given them up entirely, according to reports, the haptic philosopher keeping time by the hand and light in a window that the pilgrim near collapse may shine forward from denial, through settled fog and into the arms of a dance poised for its cue.

Since You Asked

The poet, meaning to learn.

Well, if you really want to know, the poet sighed, then laughed, adding, join the club. Find ways to introduce these forms whose names are unsayable. No, you may not know them; only feel, then translate. Invent instead some healing. Do not. Repeat. This will not be understood. What do you mean, these shadows? They are your companions. No, you may not lock them in a room of symbol and lose the metaphorical key. You need to take this out eventually, what is still dripping. Into sun.

Thought of a Tear

Telling home.

When the night does not end by shatter of night, but by sunrise,
and beneath this sun, roots hold, if a son of the land should
find beside him a living daughter and beneath the sun, root
to hold beneath the land of ruins and holding, find water––
and if the water should make it to the lips of a child in time,
the child may yet grow. To tell a story. It will begin: We lived.
And the still living will hear it and be moved. To sing it back,
hands to the sun, We––