The warmup.
Not sure what when I am waking
I am doing, waking thinking, what
am I doing here? with the what that
I am needing not enough still and yet
going on: up anyway, out again. I have to
gather my what for an hour with my coffee
just being here in this bed with this book, these
books that I may be a semblance of passing for ready
when I leave.
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.
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.
Against light pollution.
These eyes trained on sky still guide wild flights by stars, set courses for migration at midnight––
But what can they find in the glow bleeding from the empire’s cities?
Still singing hallelujahs of nobody knows, forever-present notes that know what no hand grants, no thief can steal.
Reaching back to the original promise in the first split of atom from an original rib to give birth to the genesis of song––
In the space of a womb, a surrogate tomb for the still unburied,
long dead still––
singing unnamed solids behind these gates
the liquid river sings us––
still
singing
our home.
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.
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.
In language.
What tongue I may have inherited has long since dissolved upon landing. So now the constant challenge is naming while conjugating past and present at once. To walk naked into this astonishing force, a mind not mine from which I am nevertheless breathed among all others––this congregation of dreams, any number of which may condense under pressure, returning to rain a new forecast.
The width of this reaching.
Compassion is furious
astonishment, weeping
in staggering elation.
The possibility of this
ongoing life.
With shipwreck.
The secret of the stolen apple: an inverted sweet to burn the tongue. When the old vision of paradise meets its wreckage on this shore, the storybook rainbow breaks with it, and from the collective corpse erupts a wild flight of blue lotus, each of these a newborn god, laughing.
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.
