I remember the shadow
of that tree’s ancient grief
knobbed where it grew
into the breaks,
how it held us
from the heat,
the solid weight
of that shade.
Acacia
Shielding
Category: faith
Before Sky
When a bird
How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.
That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal.
What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what.
Trembling
Pulse
The small trembles before the great, a learned response, essential for survival. What happens when the small is so puffed up with the air of his own invention that he forgets trembling, dismissing all capacity for awe of anything beyond his mirror?
See
Beyond sight
O weak faith,
what do you call
this, then––?
crowding the air
with those eyes?
Wayward One
Willing to approach
Even this pot-bellied prayer, who staggers to the altar half-drunk with delusion, and the other half hungover with optimistic excess, leaning now into despair, even in blindness, in these neglected robes, stinking and torn in all the wrong places, with potatoes growing where hearing might breathe, who can’t carry a tune to save a life, who can’t even start by saving the one they have, who will forget this morning’s penitence at the next chance to scheme some way ahead––even this one here is greeted with the warmth of a loving parent just now seeing a beloved child for the first time after so long away that anyone with any sense would have declared them lost, a hopeless case, too far gone.
Limbic Linguistics
The architecture of beginnings
There is a dream of finding home inside a single, endless sentence––not one to be realized except intermittently, in fleeting sightings of the wonder it might become––not protection, but enactment of a dance in time with the chorus of the living, whose expansive breath would naturally include the dead, breathing into these and into me, too, and we would be where there is no there, only here, and we, laughing. Breaking open. Our faces to find behind them. A grammar that cannot be verified, made of a logic we may approach but never encode, only and ever––
Incant
The open mouth
If it gets so dark
that singing seems
to stop
like a final answer
to that constant question
would you find me
where I wait
in silent suspension
open mouthed or tight-lipped
and remind me back
to music
one faltering note
at a time
to the beginning of the first
song?
Would I know
what lives
at the bottom
of the first
breath to rhyme
with the heights
of the last?
Would it know
me? Could it
enter, even
then?
Wink
Witness standing
Stars throb against the rim of what I see, and my reaching hands hold like waving a signal to the departed, We’re over here! Come join!
And in their winking response I glimpse the humor of their restraint before my limits. I always think the thing to bear is longing and never consider arrival, or the unspoken answer to the questions I’ve begged.
And where do you think we’ve gone off to? And which of us is missing, now?
Sacred Space
Children under siege
to grow
to think
to dream
to build
futures
in confinement
under threat of execution
underground
to rise
As Above
A cycle repeats
These whose trespass by dreaming to build a sky wide enough to hold up time and daughters in the sun press sides and backs together to make trees of a common reach. For water, for their sons, as the sun goes dark. Not to be moved, they are plowed, knocked down, shot, and mocked; they bleed from the sides of them, but the rhizome threads reveal themselves now a vast below, to hold. Here is the same sky that turned dark when guards at the first turning murdered the liberator for trespass of healing touch, for refusal to stone them, for exiling none but the moneychangers in the temple, whose blood fell and still falls into this earth, who told the woman on the road of sorrows to save their tears for the children––who are these, dusty feet in the earth seeded with the rising dead pressing hands into the wound of an ancient promise.