Category: faith

inaudible birds

pending confirmation

on a summer evening in the Super El Niño year
a body gets to worrying
about the birds
how the babies get thrown
from their nests
in the latest desert monsoon
a week after flocks fall
dead in the heat when
the avian flu once thought confined
to factory farms
has leaked somehow to shorebirds
then seals
then sea lions
as though categories were only temporary fences
& i
want to hear what they are saying because
i worry about running
out of time to hear
meanwhile am going
on an hour now trying to log in
to this airline Yes I Did Reset the Password
& again
& again
locking on one thing i can set right by persistence
& attention to detail
& again
it does not work
with a tiny pink error code
& a miniature number
to call
but not now
tomorrow maybe at a less convenient time
when a body should be doing other work
such as the work of living
or else replying
to indicate that i have received the notices
re: updated student loan repayment plans
& re: SAT registration dates for rising juniors
& then onto work email
re: exciting changes coming this semester
(read: same dysfunction/ same hope/ new flavors. . . & a logo!
schedules & possibly even working bathrooms coming soon!)
& i have returned the bagged lettuce to the store
in response to the latest outbreak of whatever
& my daughter came home without my hearing
over three fans so when I wake sweating around 2 am to text
is everything okay? i get moose emoji in reply
& yah are you? with selfie in bed now my turn
lol laughing emoji eyes not adjusted yet
i read the clock wrong moose did not hear
& now the cat on my chest offended
by the visible bottom of her bowl
or perhaps because of the fans so loud
or something in me so loud running
wanting just a little more time to catch
the better end of the story
let there be a better end
to tell it forward this time
to tell ourselves and mean it
not
running
& it is not in the end about getting
anywhere
is it?
only not this
running so loud
& so fast
we cannot hear
the birds

undocumented gravities

what bends the fabric

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

*

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.

the speed of almost seeing

a poem of reaching

a poem whose seeds were birthed on this blog over the summer, out this week in Blue Earth Review, a publication of Minnesota State University.

I am in love with Minnesota, home of Minneapolis, the occupied city bravely resisting takeover by the goon squad of a fascist regime––with love and care, courage and grace.

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.

the weight of the line

gone fishing to find it

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.

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.

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