Cyclic repairs
Because you can only hold that mouthful of silence for so long until it guesses you empty of time and the breath comes loose where the reins give way, let the eyes finally mute their speech to find what drifts downlight to arrive along the banks. Claw nearer to some jagged edge and hold.
On wants
Cushion the head
when it is too tired to lift
and stitch the shadow back
to her source.
At another shore
At the impasse
beside this night,
bodies arrive
to be washed
and the hour returns
to botched rites:
incomplete burials,
baptismal fonts gone dry,
the hands and their memory
opening to waters opened
by a perfect vessel
at the peak of its wake
having only ever wanted
to be released, explained.
Now a scorched earth
flames a storm
to absolve the eyes
for turning away
and now what
to do with this
wreck but watch
for the strange fish
to find it, for the
coral to collect
to begin again
that cycle of
looking to be
fed.
The weight of being
. . . Okay, but here is a warning. I am no machine, so you will not make me faster or more efficient by dismantling my parts and addressing them one at a time. I will not be fixed. Repair, on the other hand, is a process I welcome. Now I am seas against shores and now I am a single battered rock and next thing you know I will be washed up, waiting, smooth and gleaming at a shore, unnoticed tide after tide until one day there is someone walking low to the ground on uncertain feet to find the wonder of the moment, the smooth weight of so much wear, round and solid in her toddler’s hand.
Intentional geographies
I know you dreamt of wings
but all I can make is maps
of words
and I hope
one day to sketch a way
back to a moment when
you knew carrying hands.
A prayer against destruction.
That space be nearer
and I in it touching you
and we in it held
beyond what shatters
still.
Dreaming relief.
I have drifted from the constant goings on around here, these doings that are always a big to-do, but I remain, doing them as needed. This must be what causes such pain at the temples the moneychangers causing a racket in there and I would love to throw them out, but my strength is used keeping on. This must be the pain at the temples, tension of a line drawn taut between where I am and are, am and will, I and we.
After Mahmoud Darwish.
Let me be the bewildered self, the balloon of me in the wind, in vertigo, shaking, the air too thin. If you are not a rain, my love––but how sudden when you come––be a tree. I see you, sky, the sudden heat. If you are not my bewildered self–– o friend, the tether thinning, the weight of me already not enough. If my soul dismounts to walk beside me––friend, the blood of gums now on my tongue, my teeth, before you. On the verge of dawn, at the sight of siege, the alarms, the morning dove––o tree, if my soul in dread of waking against the fuzzed tongue of night should sleep instead, restore my sorrow back to this bewildered self that I may be with you again on the verge of a dawn about to rain.
***
Written in conversation with Mahmoud Darwish’s A State of Siege.
From the pit.
What hungry mouth still stirs here at the breast of its bloody becoming, to scratch light from the surface of a longing night? Another winged man at a precipice, weight of the albatross discarded from the neck in favor of stolen flight.
What passes through the bent arch of towering bridge between shores, each with a resident watchkeeper long decided too mad for words––who has given them up entirely, according to reports, the haptic philosopher keeping time by the hand and light in a window that the pilgrim near collapse may shine forward from denial, through settled fog and into the arms of a dance poised for its cue.
The poet, meaning to learn.
Well, if you really want to know, the poet sighed, then laughed, adding, join the club. Find ways to introduce these forms whose names are unsayable. No, you may not know them; only feel, then translate. Invent instead some healing. Do not. Repeat. This will not be understood. What do you mean, these shadows? They are your companions. No, you may not lock them in a room of symbol and lose the metaphorical key. You need to take this out eventually, what is still dripping. Into sun.
