healing Archives

Carriers

Of flesh and earth.

Here comes another to be named,
where naming will not capture
her back. This is some other place now,
where the mountaintop froze above
its consecrated ground, above
these walls, their trumpets,
our removal.

Alice wakes, weeping snowmelt.
How easily we reason, but
this sight may come too late.
Blind mice run from the knife.
and here is our mirror-girl again,
after the rabbit. Heralds, run.
The gaze is silver. Its illuminating fire
now spent.

We figure one another out of living,
from a dream not remembered.
Take off your shoes, daughter.
Drip tears into ash. Time leaks
a sermon from the eyes
of its messengers where words
are impossible, back into the open
mouth.

Pleas

And tidal shifts.

But how, though. We wanted to know. Do we get there?

The old woman laughed. What you get in this current is changed, she said, by surrender of known wants to unknown tides, your time no longer free but bound with shining threads of taut infinities.

Waltz

With crouching figure.

Skin trembles with the muscle that sheathes the innermost reaches of the lush garden behind a poem that is tended to nurture and feed the disarmed and disappeared, which never asserts except to underscore an endless stretch of unseen elements, each moved only to dissolve the ends of their reach to attach at the points of dissolution, into some more and ever unknown, whole.

Discordant Note

One possibility.

The challenge of enduring through ordinary objects amid this constant awareness of something screaming and you think what you want is a beginning you can call after the screaming stopped but naming it reveals the error. No, that is not what you want, that sudden silence. Only the still living can scream. What you want is a beginning you can call when the voice found some rest in the endurance of other voices to sound its siren, when the sound of this was all, and we lived inside it, becoming so unlike ourselves that music would recognize what we were, and play us again.

That All May Hear

Words of the unseen world of an unrecognized people.

This morning, I am careful in the hours before I am ready to be awake, when I am still in the first sips of coffee, and still with a full week ahead, where I let my eyes rest when I click open the morning paper. As one learns to be, depending on the day, calculating the risk of sliding into an abyss. Head at an angle, I slid my eyes quickly to the fringes like someone sneaking into a room, and down the right column, to rest on the image of a living face. He smiles, but not in the way people smile when they learn to leverage the image for gain. He smiles with puzzled amusement, like he is looking for the face behind the lens. His face, deeply contoured above the caverns at his neck, is a landscape unto itself, framed by an old man’s large ears.

His name is his language means dog without an owner. Dog in his language means something other than an insult. He is in his late eighties when he writes it at the table with his daughter, as his mother taught him. His mother was a memory keeper.

The language his mother taught him was the language of her grandparents and it was long considered extinct. It is the language of a people who had lost the land they lived on but not the words by which they had loved her.

We had learned over time, Jaime explains, not to speak to those who could not hear. But I exist, he says. I am here.

***

Inspired by Natalie Alcoba’s New York Times article about Blas Omar Jaime of Paraná, Argentina, who recently decided to speak Chaná, the language his mother had taught him, which had long been considered lost.

Prayer in Wartime on the Birthday of Another Murdered Liberator

For the dispossessed, displaced, and endangered.

Shelter the children. And the creatures that keep them: the furred, webbed, winged, gilled. And the eyes that still see them, even when they have been cast in the role of immature versions of the enemy monster by the monster who does not see himself.

Shelter the unburied, and the spirits of the dead, and the mirrors. That all who kill may recognize the killers and allow into the long night of their making the light of the despised and dispossessed, and meet them, weeping, to eat together, and by this light and the flame of their shared meal, to burn the rot of empire from its host, the living body of the river of bodies into one beginning, away from this collective end.

Shelter God and the name of God and the children of unrecognized gods and the children of men and winged creatures everywhere, the webbed and gilled, furred, and waiting, and all who hold a single question: if I live, how will I? Who hold this up, round and luminous, the reflective whole of its trembling body against every imperative to kill, against every impulse to look away.

The Skins of Oranges

Prayer for hands in wartime.

After every blast, the sky was obscured by dust. But look, you said to me, touching. There is an old man selling oranges. Dust in his beard, his hair, all over his coat. Look closer. See the shine of the oranges. You don’t get that, after a barrel bomb, unless you take a wet rag and polish each, one at a time.

O watching stars / O birdcall
O hands over faces/ O names

Come back. Come ever.

Come now.

Flesh Chorus

From past, until––

Sing in us a song to unwrite what has been overwrought onto the bodies of earthly creatures, their backs and faces, beds and nests, limbs and soils, eyes and the marrow of mountains, each vessel to overflow with what floods between seen and unseen, light to lift the lies from torn pages of official record. Resound.

Night Hope

In winter.

May wind seed a lullaby to dive us from this race and faces fall from ourselves and their constant choreography into another current, its fluid wing of night bird, to sing the hour’s next beginning.

Histories in Gold

Records of conquest.

Once, amid covenant of salt and lamps to burn every evening through quiet, into dark, one had the idea to cut the groves. He suggested this to others. He knew what vanities to stoke, whose appetites were violent enough to take pleasure in the raid, as though doing so would bring a final calm, an end to the torment of those despairs and passions that would strike at midday and midnight.

But what followed were empty pleasures, and now these hungers were of greater volume. From there, they built the walled cities and armies of men to protect them, and these grew notions of valor that were married to the work of weapons and attendant armors, of seizing and attendant claims, might and its supporting rights. With these, they enacted many plunders; called these Victory, claimed them Saving, recorded as the Project of Civilization.

There was much claiming in those days, of the spoils of war. Over time it became unfashionable to call out the spoils; stating the obvious was something only a dullard would do. But the claim of the owners was birthed in violence when they ran off with the sheep, and when the salt loses its flavor over time, who remembers those first trees?