Category: poetry

Before Art

Reaching.

maybe all you wanted at the start was to take
the perforated present
shot through with holes to carve it to make
the dappled light it held look like it meant all along
to be held like that maybe you only wanted
to test some strength against the coming loss not
necessarily yours maybe it was in the living fossils
among us, the beyonds they tended to point to
by being there where we were
o teeth
o sorrow
o wonder
o breath
where do you go in this now
but shh you tell me try not to look
like that meaning I think this gulping way
where you try to take it
o all of it at
once

Over Boneland

Fragments in wartime.

The bones had to set when we broke them and we set them in the earth amid the burn in the skeletons of former homes still smoking to grow new cells we needed––

hold still they told us meaning faith but without work it looked half dead in the mirrors 

we listened for wolves and saved the prints in boxes for someday when we would sort them all 

out into a proper display but what happens when the waters rise 

is that sometimes you have to jump to the next roof and hope it holds. 

Hey Siri, asked in secret, What do you know of shelter?

It was something to do when knowing you had no service did not preclude the need to speak 

we reached

ready for the next ledge she might have said you can wait until its dark 

Siri we might have answered, I believe, to heal our unbeliefs.

Lightbulb

To change it.

When one day you know as you could not before
how you are going and this comes before you know how, how
do you save anything from something that no one will see

if one day the lights in the air
if one day the sounds behind the silent air
rears up if one day getting a grip is like
waking in the morning trying for a fist

how do you find a way if one day you decide
better to do something

than nothing at all.
How to bake bread.
How to remember
the names of all

the categories there are
for things that are and
still, nowhere––

The Moment and the Hand

Point of contact.

Closer. Lens moves over hillside, black with ash from the last burn. Find the fire poppies above the road. Where are they and the first call when it comes is a reminder: check the nightstand lock the doors.

Who is safe is a not a question. She holds it. Describe the sound of water eroding a mountain. With the cold moon come hungry dogs to howl night. 

Father seeking son, without the right address. Where do you send the words to tell him, Son I am thinking. To tell him what. To tell him finally. Of you and mean it. And imagine that he reads.

But if the numbers are wrong you cannot deliver. We cannot be delivered without the right numbers and until they come every stranger looks like a prayer almost answered and only a few of these look up.

Take notice when looking for a son and see one there on his knees beside the shoulder where it’s time to look and look again. When no movement follows call but the wind of passing cars in roadside sage then call again and wait. 

Hold the name against your tongue. Against the soft skin of the roof of your mouth. Of the son with no roof to shield his head. Don’t say it. Closer, calling hey and are you to the stranger and alright and how does anyone answer this now except to say yes except to indicate the pulse that means still living but it’s the rising blooms from the ash you need now. 

Move the lens. This distance from the burn will yield nothing. Go in.

Just in Case

Early lessons in looking.

Children reviewed scenarios. What to do when you are lost in a wilderness with no aid and no promise of its coming. A book might say if they found the right one, how to leave a trail by walking through what is soft. To stop at intervals to write HELP in the snow in the sand in the mud with an arrow pointing in the direction of the feet. How if the course is reversed. To travel back over the prints. To alert anyone who is looking, if anyone is looking, not to go beyond the tracks. To follow the lines of roads and rivers and listen well. If a party calls, they will use an unusual word. Three syllables. Internet! Coconut! Spaghetti! Leave personal items behind. But who has the book.

You can learn to look this way, scanning the horizon for smoke signals, for mirror flash, to train the ear to hear the distant cry. But how did you learn to meet it, children wondered, of the expectation that anyone grown would know where to go when it was time, and when? When the wind comes. Who ties it all down. They cut the books of questions into strips, folded each line into a basket. They would need more for the carrying. 

We Came With Questions

From somewhere.

Give us, they demanded. Some witness. Prayer wants
some sacrifice. To make it count. Prayer wants some
relief from the next sacrifice. To be counted.

Tie my tongue, love. Make me beg. To be heard.
I know what they are telling you. How no murder
happened here and no man ever flew. But I have
lived here long enough to recognize denial
of monsters when I see it

and I see it I see them creeping unseen

[Creep me] back to the dark of noon daylight
when the chorus stopped to haunt these ears
when I before the sky and moon called back
o waiting stars o endless space beyond you

forever made of what. Bring me back.

Final Offer

After the burn.

What do you call the records kept by those who escape from war with nothing but their lives and memories of the dead? Not History, but its adjacent double. The shrapnel in tissue when the bleeding learned to stop waiting for peace, to start saying this is the leg now, the cause going no further than the blast itself as if to say, here is the end of time as you knew it as if to blow into injury some reminder: this is the living now.

These fragments from the blast, this thread that bound us once so long in the weather and the sweat of my grip, past the point of being able to imagine an end or a beginning, love I only want to offer them to you, for keeping even after safe is gone.

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