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?
Children under siege
to grow
to think
to dream
to build
futures
in confinement
under threat of execution
underground
to rise
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
