To memory’s watch.
Time was not the grace we had expected, but groping and atonal. In its presence, we barely knew ourselves. We’d see the photos later like, yes, but where was I? Memory moved to answer, but spoke only the language of missing parts, and we were not reaching for those, exactly. We held our hands just in front of our hips as we walked, fingers cupped as though holding the faces we missed.
At a cliff.
Say it’s a last day. Say the seagull knows. Say this is the explanation for that seeming pointed look where it stops just now on this eye-level post. There are these urgent clouds at the horizon, the edge of a tongue frayed toward song. Bodies inflected against the tide. To be washed, a quiet instrument waiting. If our dead watch, let someone play me now. That I may praise it, too.
A record of intentions.
Then let it be known that the bleeding bodies of our words went first. Once emptied they could be sharpened to capital letters and fired toward certain ends. The first layer of a portrait is wet on wet, a luminosity that won’t come again. Point being, let this not be a likeness, but more.
When everyone had waved goodbye and the cars between us hummed a question of what might be saved, there came a flame at the end of the sharpened tip of a sawed limb, and we could touch but not taste it. We meant to leave the known world, but it chased us, yipping at heels.
We meant to tap the skies until from somewhere behind their altitudes we heard the click of a door about to give.
From cliffs of fall.
A question for the father, of forgiveness
and fear, content as any eye that knows
it cannot see, invents an answer, always
yes, we will find the gate and it will be
unbolted. Don’t worry, once the bug
is dead you can do no harm, so let
the finale let the lamp come and beam.
It was not night reminding of burials.
It wasn’t the veil or the dress but
the body inside, revealing itself
after removal to be an animated
ghost.
***
Inspired by a line from Gerald Manley Hopkins.
Driving home.
Grit over teeth, ash of last trees on concrete and I remember shade, limbs reaching and how the reach itself was still good and the want had yet to creep its vining hold and too far was still an abstract. It’s all moon tonight, all tides, and I’m reminded back to your last question, the one about where I went. The way I am still there but not with an answer. It’s a big yellow face, less definition than some and yet the humor of it shines through, demanding at least a wry twist of the lips even at this edge. Hello, Moon, and Goodnight and Good Luck and when my daughter was born the nurse said, she can smell you better than she sees.
In the pregnant pause.
If the edge
if the fall
if the downpour
or a sudden neglect
of the next breath
if in the heat to the land
of no light the blind prophet
will not come, if the wailing
starts again, if the Edens are
forever gone and the third day
brings no relief and the next call
no answer if the cold brings the
ships again––or won’t, please do
not lay this down while you are
here. Please, stay
for the carrying
until there is
none.
In lieu of an answer.
I want to tell you I was there and that I did it––that it mattered, and I know. But you live and you get up again and keep on and eventually you get to thinking, so much for knowing, and keep on.
To call but not back.
Certain loves move this way, entire lives
sharing only this admission in the end:
I do not know you anymore. And yet. Will you?
––a refrain and its penance, demanded.
It varies. Who is addressed.
Maybe this is the crux of our want.
To be challenged, then absolved.
We went out looking for the animals,
but the animals had gone. They ran
from their names. We had to admit.
That it was possible we had the wrong
names.
And wake.
In the old world
we left ourselves
dreaming days to come,
but upon arrival wanted
to crawl back in. Now the
eyes open with reluctance
to the same sea, but the
angle is wrong, and instead
of the land at our feet there
is only the sky we once
rushed ourselves into,
and the wake.
Shift change at the city gates.
The turning happened where we almost ended, feeling the old king’s gaze, the walls of his long sleep around him, each drowsy syllable dripping from the mouth a study in the effects of subatomic explosions.
How long? We wondered, had been wondering. We shivered, had been shivering, naked in the shadow of the fortress. The next cold rain started a whisper among us, in the direction of concessions. What was the point? with the freeway cars above us hissing Yes.
We could have run then. I think we almost did. But one dropped her knees to the grass and then her ear, and we followed, to hear who was coming beneath our soles to be counted, even now.
