to fit this fabric
one escapes the body to find her form
and asks, what can I give to you, love?
to catch a current of blood and fly
back to salt tears singing all that makes
such reckless reaching so despised,
to keep on with her flayed and wild
drumming, to dance beyond repair
into some manner of light that will
resist all explanation.
settling into the dark passage
How else does one go about making a soul, anyway, except by taking the aches as they come, one by one? I see you, Heartache. Lamentations, I heard you coming from miles away. Come in, chip away, then; there is plenty of me to go around. I know already that you’re going darken the whole place down. Here’s one way to find those little lights that have been hiding in the cracks, keeping company with the mice who ran off with the last of the cheese.
in the after
The point, if there is one, is to emerge. Or else, to acknowledge the emergence of something. It is possible these acts are synonymous, or that one lives inside the other. Does it matter which holds which? Likely not. Whichever it is, it won’t be fitting into that familiar template of the hero myth––having tried this one, and found it lacking, possibly deadly.
before him
There is a way to abide,
knowing this is all there is:
to protect, understanding
that one of us needs to be
the adult in the room.
who leans to listen
Above a consecrated ground still wet with our new dead, a cloud of witnesses rise, beholding. What warnings, unheeded, echo now. They turn the earth again, by sighing wind, to find the moment’s tear and mend it back to here.
and the measure of art
Anything made in this space can neither reflect or embody the life it leans into, but may at best assemble images as instruments with voices of the dead, their players. Unknown concerts happen all the time, keeping time with each tree falling unheard in the distant forest. Now in the shaded alleyway, now at the bus stop, in the basement, the interior of an economy car in a strip mall parking lot. Is it that we cannot help ourselves, making what would call them out? It seems more likely that we would be paved easily enough by asphalt, by overwork, hunger, stress––and forget. I suspect it is the dead who can’t help themselves, reaching back to touch what lives the way we might have touched old photographs in another time, when there seemed more of it. To recollect by offering back the longing notes of these images, their edges sharpened to cut whatever they touch, to make it stranger, as a reminder: you do not know what this is. You do not know what you are.
of lead
Bird, sing into this place for the weight of what remains, for I mean to shelter what may not be saved.
sparrow looks back
May breath continue. May not-yet-imagined descendants of a coming dawn know birdsong and the creak of timeworn joints tempered by long life.
in the dark times, singing
Three weeks ago, I met a daughter, just out of rehab, tattoos on her face.
You don’t get tattoos on your face so young and so beautiful unless. You don’t get those without knowing what it means to be taken from all knowing and collapsed into container for taking the pain as it comes from the strangers who come from a place from which memory has long been erased and every effort made to replace its former volume with desperate force. It doesn’t take so much imagination to understand what happens to girls in desperate places.
She was gentle and frightened and I sat with her in solemn awe, I see you, daughter, and now––here. I could offer only space and calm (no, I didn’t have the wifi code, none of us did) and said what I could about the possibility of story, to take the stuff of before and bring it before the fire of pen on page, fingertips on keyboard, voice taking stage before the formerly silent self, to sing brokenness back into being. “I like this,” she said, “I need more of this.”
It was days between losing and marking the loss to a system of regulations in the name of keeping safe and I nodded my acceptance when they told me as I imagine she may have, eventually, after they took her away––even through boiling rage against another senseless day in the wake of so long breaking–––meaning to maintain devotion to the hope for an ordering hand, coming where waiting feels like a looping prayer, Say the Word.
May she find that word, or it find her.
to be moved
Willow bends, knowing to open to the strange angel of breaking wind.
