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Hot Mess

Heart on display.

How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––

to give me away

like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––

like she is eager to give me away

to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!

And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.

And I hear.

The Skins of Oranges

Prayer for hands in wartime.

After every blast, the sky was obscured by dust. But look, you said to me, touching. There is an old man selling oranges. Dust in his beard, his hair, all over his coat. Look closer. See the shine of the oranges. You don’t get that, after a barrel bomb, unless you take a wet rag and polish each, one at a time.

O watching stars / O birdcall
O hands over faces/ O names

Come back. Come ever.

Come now.

Invocation

Notes from another war.

What I meant to say was not what I said. But this: If death is certain, only timing unknown, will you wait for me where you are living, for I do not know what I am. Here where a child starts a sentence “When I was young . . .” and he is nine. Here where grass is fried in oil until the grass is gone and surgery happens by the light of cell phones.  How fragile, these bodies. In the rubble, you see a hand, reach for it. But where is the rest.

What I meant to say was not what I said, but this. If we met on the shore where I keep vigil, would you know me? Could we sing? Could we continue then, against the fire whose fuel is men and stones, women and children, water and the flesh of my flesh? Would we?

Revolutions of Form

Being in the meantime. Now.

It is dark except for the low light of the lamp, and something rumbles nearby, in a fissure between seen and unseen. Then a screeching note, followed by wingbeat near the window across from where I sit. Noting how I dreamed again of you in trouble, and me trying to get somewhere in time. But where. Like so many of these dreams, I can only describe its geography as an urgent atmosphere of too-bright light, noisy with crowds and a sense of executioners above us. As I run to find you, there is a scope somewhere, a running form in its crosshairs, and the crowds are rivers of us, and for each other body in the crosshairs I am part of the crowd in the desperate dream where we feel the insignificance of this flesh against the thing we mean to prevent in time.

And what do I do now with this sense, but sit and spin in it, in these fifteen––no, ten––minutes before I have to move again, out again to where the screeching flies, to the place of urgent details and not enough time? I note again the feeble voice crying stop, how it sounds like one that started crying a long time ago, long enough to lose the urgency of the initial scream, near expired like the droning whine of an infant soon to fall exhausted back to sleep.

Dear Poet

On this dreaming.

You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.

Time Being

In language.

What tongue I may have inherited has long since dissolved upon landing. So now the constant challenge is naming while conjugating past and present at once. To walk naked into this astonishing force, a mind not mine from which I am nevertheless breathed among all others––this congregation of dreams, any number of which may condense under pressure, returning to rain a new forecast.