faith Archives

bones of the suns

view from the updraft, suspended

The bones had to set when we broke them—
we set them in ash after each burn,

beside skeletons of former homes, still smoking.
We needed new cells to grow. Hold still, they said,

teaching how to manage the waiting period.
They meant faith—but without the work

it looked half-dead in our mirrors. We listened
for wolves. We saved their prints in boxes

for someday—for sorting, for display. But what
do you name the waters rising high enough to jump

to the next roof, hoping that one holds? Other questions
scratched outside us. Siri, what do you know of shelter?

It was something to do; knowing you had no service
didn’t stop the need to speak. We reached ready

for the next ledge, and she might have said, You can wait
until dark. Siri, we might have answered—I believe,

to heal our unbeliefs. The ghosts before us pointed next
and up ahead. We had begged to see it. But one wing,

caught in the updraft, suspended—still looking back—
It was the wreck we marched from. It looked away.

We looked away. It was possible, then, to keep wishing—
merrily down a lane to the land of the dead.

Tracing its thread against honey-slick tongues, we offered
first milk. Some kept their breasts bound for harvest moon.

And when it came, there would be blood, and money—
enough to say: we’ll be okay another year

until time
comes to pull it back again— the sun

of our once
and future sons.

notes from proclamation season

“One must not be too romantic about stability.” – Simone Weil

I sought stability, to make it out of love.
Which I did, and continue to do.
While the ones who never knew

its substance, or how to make
any of it for themselves, come
barging in on missions and leave
a mess. I clean again, then rest,
and breathe relief.

One of these warriors, gone off
again now, would make better
company if he were ever here
or anywhere close to here
or now.

Who still keeps proclaiming how
he means to make it his next mission
to care for me. If there’s one thing
I don’t need to be, it’s another man’s
mission toward eternity.

He’ll return to see he’s made
another mess of another failure
of grand proclamation.

This is why I prefer the cat’s company,
her present immediacy, attention.
Who teaches me in her steady gaze
that I am not yet half as grounded
as I mean to be, as I keep being
pulled away.

horse & rider

a tribute to the moment, and this place

Yes child, maybe one day,
in another world, the horse arrives,
its rider gallant and able. But now
is not that world

and this is not that time. Now he
spins, having lost both horse and will
to ride–– and besides, has never learned.

You are alone–– yet, look around.
Find the company of everyone before
you who has ever learned the same.

There is no more now
to do than there was before, only
less illusion. Carry on. Chin up.

Giddy-up. You are the horse
and the rider. Go on.

to explain this absence,
let’s say i’ve been fishing
because what other phrase
will fit? that i have been feeling
the line to test the weight
of the line and what it will carry
when the noise wears my ears
stopped full of it now,
when eye breaks
from will to look
where do senses go?

and sense

when the organs will no
longer play to the unwilling
mind?

vegetable mineral

animal sounds

I arrive in middle age at a beginning, so now I write and speak. I do these acts to correct some learned habits of believing I must know where I will end before I open my mouth to say anything. Such learned habits, I see now, have conditioned my seeming docility.

Fortunately, I have no ends. Better yet, I see this now. So here is as good a place as any, to begin.

This is a small act of defiance, against the idea that the purpose of saying anything is to make a point and that the point is to mean something. Some perspective is afforded now, from witness. To the urgency of the kings of the world, to end this life. (To be clear, some make the point more subtly than others, but to be a prize is a kind of end, and it is possible to spend a life chasing this state, only to learn to see it for the burial it is.)

This affords some confidence to say that one approach that many take when confronted with the impossible fact of a life, is to bring it to a point. Some end to justify the means and all of that. Very Machiavellian. Such notions are rampant now. Knowing this moves me, too.

Nothing I mean to say is so abstract that it may be extracted, like oil from my flesh. Oil, biologically speaking, is the accumulation of bodies under pressure over time. I am nowhere near the age of oil, as I am still alive. The fact of being so is what I mean to value now.

Also, my connection to the dead. This, I treasure. How would I continue, I wonder, without their excellent company? The dead have always been around me, speaking. These and the not yet born have much to say, and little of their ripe and blooming abundance has anything to do with points. The dead, as you may imagine, often have a sense of humor when it comes to ends, as this affords their carrying on. The not-yet-born are young enough to laugh with full bellies of air, at the absurdity, of aiming for a point in the midst of all of this.

to bird us

some return in music

Where once music, now noise. I mean to sing against the roar of it, to find the others to recover a refrain from memory. To call and call in aria, unceasing, I do––but for today, only shelter. Only weep.

devotion

study in shade

hear these minor tones, dissonant echoes, nocturnal murmurs
whisper of hellhound behind, tremble sound haunting hollow
taste of revenant ash in throat, beneath each note this velvet
dissonance—

here where sea pushes into land: roaring liquid love, thunder
crashing at the lip of the last wave—and the next.

where Pollock pours black enamel over raw canvas, painting
like a man already buried. Here is love freed from time.

here are the rites of the bull cults, the fetid silence
of hardened blood, evicted angel beating one wing
over trembled flame—

no longer showing but shown through.
no longer singing, but sung into—

by jagged notes, passing through
the charmed demon winding sand
ripping the sails that carried you
and when the sails are gone––

all sea
all sound.

on making

what we mean to remember

I have been meaning to write a note here for almost a week now. It is Memorial Day in the states, which might occasion a purposeful message of solemn remembrance to honor those who lost their lives in service. A day for remembering fallen soldiers, visiting cemeteries, offering commemorative words. Mine would be inadequate today, so I refrain.

Also in the states, this is the holiday weekend that traditionally marks the opening of summer––barbecues, beach trips, and quite a few celebrations. My love’s birthday, my daughter’s close-friend’s quinceañera, and my brother’s wedding. In preparation for the wedding, I spent some time extracting stills from a video slideshow of my grandfather, who died of old age over a decade ago. Several of these photos featured him as a smiling young man in his WWII-era Army attire, complete with wool coat. The photos I had were all black and white. But for him, those moments happened in color.

The federal holiday means schools, government offices, and many other locations are closed today, so for me it’s the first moment I’ve had in almost a week to catch my thoughts in any meaningful way. It’s a chance to nurse a cold in bed instead of rushing to work jacked up on caffeine and Sudafed. And, now that the festivities are behind us, to try to remember what was happening on other planes.

I opened Nelle Morton’s book of essays to a dog-eared page from “A Word We Cannot Yet Speak” to find this line: As fire is known in the burning, not in the ashes, sight is known in the seeing, not in the eyes. This feels relevant in ways I am trying to access through my stuffy head. The essay is about bodily understanding, the kind often maligned for being associated with women and other creatures outside the traditional loci of Western power systems.

When I opened my notes this morning, I had a sense of wanting to have something to say, but feeling only a dull, achy buzz. Buzz is the name of our cat who has been suffering an ailment that has been mysterious and worrisome in recent days on top of everything else. This morning’s online vet visit offers hope, which is much better than enhanced concern and nothing.

And yet. I have no meaningful note. All pain, all ache. As it was in the days leading up to the weekend’s events, in no particular way other than how it is sometimes, except that it was time to focus on joy and gratitude for beloveds and friends, for family and love, enthusiasm for the occasion to celebrate together, laughing and sweating and spinning on the dance floor, all I love you! and Don’t go! and You have to stay! until eventual hard-crashing, headache-nursing, morning-after commentary, limpid with excess, a time to acknowledge the sore throat and sneezes are not, as I was claiming earlier, from laughing so hard while responding to insistent protests of, Stay, stay! Don’t you dare leave!

Now it’s quiet. I try to collect things. I make a list. Back to work tomorrow. Try to remember. I follow the cat with a warm washcloth, apologizing between bouts of treatment. What was I doing before? With such urgency? So close to something I was meaning to carry through. I was thinking, just a little longer, stay, before it went.

volver

a mis notas

A wish. To return. To possibilities
for becoming.

The problem: these accommodations of
familiarity, adapting

To dysfunction & symptoms include:
incessant sighs, bone-weary

Fatigue & fantasies of escape.
Treatment: accommodation.

Of this need to escape,
what’s turned unbearable.

Temporarily, at least.
& then return.

To observe how it got this way
& intend.

To steer differently, soon as enough
rest comes to clear bleary fogs

From weary eyes long trained
toward casting nets

Across these dreary
& abundant bogs

Where the lost remain
preserved & waiting,
still.

Saola

and other endangered unknowns

I first knew you by your other, less-specific name, as unicorn.

Which is to say, as a creature of wondrous, near-impossible beauty.

A miracle, so I drew you at the center of a depiction I was prompted to make by my first-grade teacher. This was Catholic school in the Reagan Era in suburban New York. This is when and where and how I learned that you were forbidden.

“They did not have unicorns in the Garden of Eden,” Mrs. McClosky announced. I did not think to wonder at the time who They were, or how she had come to interview them. She wore a brooch and so knew things. I wore saddle shoes and an ill-fitting uniform and vomited in the parking lot every day, in dread of my arrival in that dark space of stone hallways, urgent bells, and seemingly inexhaustible legions of certainty, all certain I was wrong for fearing them.

I thought I knew you, so had been happy about this assignment, the first I had loved since entering school, other than the opportunity to give a staged reading of The Gingerbread Man to my kindergarten class.

You can’t catch me, you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!

Later I learned the word myth. As in mythical. Which some would use to mean fake but which I took to mean the real in story. Or the real that is larger than seen.

––And I connected it to this misunderstanding that my first-grade teacher had about you, who while real, were mythical, like The Garden herself. Which naturally led to other questions.

These questions led to others, and one day I was old enough to have learned to no longer give my first answer to the question: What do you want to be when you grow up?

A Unicorn! I had announced.

This was my first opportunity to learn that you were not a valid response where the subject was imagined possibilities. Having reflexively rejected this wholesale, I had to learn again in first grade. And did––learn something, anyway.

Later still, I began to see this I, whoever she was supposed to be, as a sort of mythical creature, possibly imaginary. She lived in dreams, and she lived in the dark. According to most official sources, most of who she was, was categorically forbidden. She was simply too––much of everything unnecessary, this creature.

Learning this was almost too much. I forgot what I could in the name of persistence. For what, I sometimes could not remember. By then I was half dead ––but the other half was living, as are you.

You only needed cover to persist, and space. Foresters removed your cover and trappers set traps in your space. These were not meant for you, specifically. You died in them anyway.

I write this hoping that you will recover. That we may recover––enough forest to protect you in the shadow regions, safely ensconced in the unseen, beyond the range of anyone who comes to count you, beyond the bite of any snare so indiscriminately set that it would capture and kill you in its teeth.

I write this praying that you may continue non-existing for your doubters.

I am not worthy, but believe.

I write this that you heal the rest of me, however well she was supposed to have learned by now, to treat the best of herself as a forbidden creature of mythical fear.

I write that we may live.

I write in the shadows, in whispers, that you may hear me.

And live that I may join you, some forbidden someday.

***

For more about the endangered creature at the center of this piece, consider The Saola’s Battle for Survival on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.