Category: love

Barometer Prayer

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.

Orchestral Notes

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.

Thought of a Tear

Telling home.

When the night does not end by shatter of night, but by sunrise,
and beneath this sun, roots hold, if a son of the land should
find beside him a living daughter and beneath the sun, root
to hold beneath the land of ruins and holding, find water––
and if the water should make it to the lips of a child in time,
the child may yet grow. To tell a story. It will begin: We lived.
And the still living will hear it and be moved. To sing it back,
hands to the sun, We––

Why Poetry

Unsatisfying answers to an impossible and enduring question.

For the world-renewing potential of an imagined response. Because the imagination is violent in its impulse to press back against the killing from without. To tilt the scales on the side of the near erased. To disobey the given order. To honor some dimension of collective soul only glimpsed. Because a pressure accumulates. Because of this abiding anxiety. Because the capacity for making transcends those of judgement and knowing. Because joy in language, thrill in meetings. At arrivals that morph into futures. In awe over the burden of experience. To push against a form that seems to demand submission and imagine not a win but an encounter with that which sings behind the fight. Because longing is endless, and music, and unknowing so complete except for a small, insistent certainty that there is a sense around this somehow, to be near it even if I have none.

***

Notes while reading Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures.

The Skins of Us

Keeping on.

Like the flecked bark of bent birch, so long scarred that scars and skin have blended, old wounds match birthmarks now, and this seems right–– to mirror fate and accident, deliberate and unknown. Once, to see it would break my heart. And did, I think. I can’t remember how. Only that at some point I knew it to be a thing of too many shards to be considered whole by any stretch, no matter how careful the mending. Not that I was so careful with the mending. But here she is anyway––of a piece, in a manner of speaking, nodding along with the head over the tattered skins of arms, as the head remarks: How fitting, for any occasion.

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.

Hot Mess

Heart on display.

How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––

to give me away

like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––

like she is eager to give me away

to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!

And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.

And I hear.

Dear Poet

On this dreaming.

You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.

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