faith Archives

Building Nests

Against the rest of it

Hang on, I tell the children. There is a place beyond this, and you get there by going in––deeper, not away. I want them to know this. I want to know this. I want to stop everything and hold each other and share whatever anybody has of food and music while the animals slide between our legs, onto our laps, our shoulders, mewing, barking, cooing in chaotic chorus until sleep.

Meanwhile, I collect the history of this––place? Time? Us? ––I don’t know which, twig by fallen twig, torn fabric scraps, dropped feathers from their wings, these pieces everywhere.

Then I catch myself doing it again, in response to the next news of the macabre. I think, no, that won’t go through, and they won’t do it, although I know better. That refusals like these work as lubricant against the gears, that refusals like these say proceed to the machine, with a sigh where a scream should be.

But I cannot spend all day screaming while there are still-living children here with me. I want them to go on living. I say, today we are making nests. Today, let’s gather what we can find. All the broken bits will do.

And when they say for what? I say, because Look, a nest is beautiful! And for the babies!

They go. We go off looking together. I wave them on ahead with a smile, and when they are out of sight, it’s time to weep.

To the Once and Future Child

Against annihilation

Love, stop carrying your grave on your shoulders.
Please, love––and start the story over
from the constant beginning where you knew,
love, the only end worth its means––
when you could still translate its sound
in the art of your fluttering hands.

Proximities

And perceptions of danger.

To dream with such madness that they still imagine dreaming beyond those walls, those armored guards who mock their trespass, but nearness to death brings a wisdom that looks like derangement to those cloaked in comfort, and these nearer know best how to see true danger, long known to swaddle its murderous intent in the softest of fabrics, the lush hides of eaten lambs. Still at their songs, to carry the road on their shoulders until it leads back to the beginning of that dream. Nearer, they sing, these mad marchers in sacred song. Nearer.

Strangers at Shorelines

Notes at the edge of a sea change

Who are these others, then? Kinship of water lapping at bare feet, the sudden excess gone again, then holding. Gulls in the spray, beneath rain. There are not many of us today, but we gather to feed an infant future, swaddled in cloud and often asleep. That it may grow fat with dream and laugh back at the shapes of our faces before learning to crawl and be caught in these waiting, open arms.

Tragic Misuse

Linguistic loss

Consider the stone in the throat
holding just below the tongue
its long silence waiting to melt
its molten song––that suddenly
slips
to drop
heavy and clanking down
the long ladder of explanation
to the pit.

Singer to her Song

From a chasm

When the gods of the golden wars are done
pruning the immortal siege of us I hope to still
call after some bird of the unseen, come, I will
feed you through the yawning lull of an entire
day the wonder of its grace long taboo, a sin
hidden in shadows of imperial gaze, amid
the absolution of the drones, the least among
us long translated to the lesser of two knowns
a third way buried in the blast still calls with
breaking voice Time says to me, o Space I fast
become a body petrified in my eternity and I
admit I am a vapor now, the scent of displaced
selves nosing tracks along scorched earth we fell
to track this body back to knowing you before

that severed joint

Mortal Coils

The practice of weaving

Call it afterlife, our dispossession from what once entwined us in the body of a vast and complete mind for the wholes of the whole of our woven kinds when we still knew the limited range of certain words and the expansiveness of others when we felt them on a breeze. I want to mend this dream back to a time before a given good became the tear in the veil of sky, before the settled weight of a single image bowed the rooves above us against our nightly returns.

Parts of a Tree

Bodies in time.

While the idols of the hour were blasting libraries to dust, we were driving home from practice with a snack and my daughter was saying, When I die, I would like to be a tree. Then my body will feed the other creatures, and the earth, and everything. Swallowing, I said great idea and we talked like that for the rest of the drive, growing limbs toward clouds, reaching for rain. And talk turned to the cat, Buzz, who was napping in the window when we got home, so we tapped it twice from outside to say hello and then laughed at the face she made back. We took a picture from outside the window and smiled to see her floating inside a reflection of the sky, clouds at her ears. I want Buzz to stay forever, too, my daughter said, and we thought maybe she could be a bird to keep napping on us and coming and going whenever she wants, and we went on like that for a little while more, wondering what we would remember together with our threaded roots and the chorus of the morning making nests in our new ancient flesh.

Before it All

Interim note.

I wait for some direction
by the chasm’s edge
of an unknown geography
until the chasm calls
back some introduction.

Reflections in Water

And the telling, slant.

My favorite detail about Perseus other than his winged horse has to do with the delicacy with which he handled that severed Gorgon head, taking care not to scratch or rough the head by grainy sands, how he thought to place it on a bed of leaves, then sea plants, how this act birthed coral.

I am reminded by Calvino, who in an age for questioning the fate of books, considered a related question of weight, and made a case for lightness. Only the reflected image allows for the presentation of what may be revealed only indirectly.

I am reminded by Moses, pleading let me see your face to God on the mountain, and God like, no but here is my backside and no doubt the frisson of such an encounter with the hind-parts of divinity is the highest achievement of any art.

How else does a winged horse emerge from Gorgon blood? By what other arrangement but such delicacy can the stomp of a single hoof draw water from stone and invite muses to drink? Where they gather to admire the horse, its beautiful wings.

Always wings, always the mountaintop. The nearness to sky, to flight. The weight of being is weight enough. Only the image––or better, song––can pulse across space, soaring.

I hope so. Let us not, before it comes, be crushed the accumulated weight of the dust of ourselves rubbled in the making and unmaking empires, those heaviest of forms.

***

Notes while reading the opening of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium.