of a long and winding perch
they tire me, these boys
who mean to make me
an old woman so young
meaning I guess to put
an end to possibility
for fear of their constant
little deaths but we manage
to love somehow in a place
of constant beginnings
far from their halls of
perpetual mirrors
& invite them in, and
they mean well but
get sick before arrival
afraid i guess to enter
anywhere where they
are not the all and
its eventual end.
emergence at twilight
hand, palm, open head bowed. it was nothing & we named it believing only hunger teaches how to dream of food never tasted even if the last calorie went to the dreaming then describing to an empty room: let me tell you about the swell of it the shining memory of that exquisite fat greasing fingers lips the smell because if hearing is the last to go there may be someone there still listening even after the death of the all we risked for the never arriving meal by scar upon scar & you kept repairing mine–why–i lived with a man whose pain would cloud then sharpen vision and no one could say which it was in any moment until its aftermath which made it hard to answer simple questions like what is that thinking yes what is that really so i started calling it by unspeakable names meant to apply one day to some constant beginning like the way you taught me to say jacaranda to the purple that waved where we walked in the ordinary reverence of Tuesday late afternoons where in your skin i am smuggled from judgement to awe
in retreat
with weakness ever infinite,
surrender is always possible,
even likely.
better to the tree than the crowd,
better to the force of gravity than
the heights of a fool, professing––
anything.
out there, in the beyond, there
is a tree and she holds up the
sky
you can walk to her, extend a foot
to a branch and let her
hold you
suspended, then breathe and look.
how much better this offering
than another needless
sacrifice? you can
stay awhile. you may need to.
let the crowd and the fools
hold forth with the sole of
your foot facing sky
let your head remain grounded
beneath her shade. Extend
a hand, return.
an original affirmation
Take it, I said again, and gave
this body to mirror you an origin
in chorus of looping yessss, as
susurrations waving shores
to where they waited, wanting
words to answer but I had only
one. It was yes and child
yes again, and there they
were yes child and here,
meaning all of it.
future objects
When the prison or its shadow becomes constant and the fugitive no longer wants to scream, sing against its fortress in scandalous melody, of exorbitant creation––not of lasting order, but as embodiment of the cycle of renewal and destruction sacred to all life. Sing to the way form freed from origin may open the way to the ecstatic space of sublime sense, out of mind and loosed from all perspective, the psychic distance between eye and image finally collapsed, in favor of the wider lens, no longer a singular consciousness, but psyche herself; no longer worldview, but vision. Bring back the missing, the not-theres, invisible. To animate the assembly back to birth.
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.
Before leaving
Part of preparing to go anywhere else always involves collecting to yourself those things that you think you may need. It doesn’t matter whether the mind doing the collecting is the conscious one––the type to make a list––or signing from an underground, unseen but essential.
what flows
Hand to hem, a plea
that what moves may pass
into the waiting vessel
not to be contained
but held until the next
to return that volume
to another mouth.
From here
What to make
of what remains
after the burn?
Orison
Before the starlight-swum sea
foam-feathered, crashing––
we held our shored skins
for saving.
