Naked feet on bare floors, elbows on the sill, hands cup the lines of a jaw, mirror
connecting the stars above the babbling towers whose shadows cloaked our daylight, beyond the reach of
hands cupping the lines of missing faces. Eyes reach anyway, holy useless as first songs and the first games in the garden, out and out with the tops of our artifices but not always the endless lines of bodies in skies where the children of gardens still hide in the dark folds where invisible stars become
— and a new one, here — in the quiet depths behind these sigh songs,
the lines of ourselves slipping, and no names yet for the unborn when we never named the dead
— in the depths behind these breaths, reaching lines toward letters, ever into some beginning, say the word.
You announced, Play a game, and you returned me––back to what I’d learned how to renounce.
BIG I held you in my arms and breathed against the silence. Then, when you were speaking, you announced, Play a game, and you returned me––back to what I’d learned how to renounce.
When you were speaking you announced, Tell me a riddle! and I held you high above me toward the stars. Here is how to croon what I am learning to announce, of wonder: here is Venus, now Orion; there a satellite, now Mars.
And everything we shared came out in singsong, and every note within it came out true. Teach me spaghetti by the moonlight, drink a spring song. Everything contained a season; it was you, in this loving cup, now brimming, lands the chorus of a soul; long bent on new receiving, long past dying in its hole. Would you wait and listen for the riddle I would tell, beyond the point of speaking past this silence of this well?
Where I have fallen will you find me, if I give you certain clues; will you listen if I play now, every verse of these late blues?
I’m finding now a riddle, and I’d sing it if I could; but I’m out of rhymes, so share here: once, man living, cut for wood.
What’s tall when young, short when old, and can die in a single breath?
This is the end of the time when we rhyme. But wait! Consider these words. Another puzzle goes like this. I kept it for you: Consider a fork in the road.
A stranger in a strange land arrives at an intersection: East or West? One will take you to your destination, the other to hopeless despair. At the fork, two men. Each knows the way, but one always lies. What to do?
LITTLE Remember how we used to play the guessing game?
Animal, vegetable, mineral: over time, like this: whenever the seahorse, during the age of the narwhal, from time to time, the tortoise––sooner or later, a ferret.
From time to time, a gem squash as long as an English cucumber. In the meantime, this heirloom tomato, and all of a sudden- Rutabaga!
At this instant, taste the snap-peas, until zucchini, okra, chives, until adamantine and agate, since granite, garnet, jacobsite.
Before, until now. Ever after, return. Again!
BIG Back to the crossroads question, and the two men. Remember this: ask either, “What direction would the other say?” Whatever you hear, do the opposite, and you will be on the right path.
Whatever you hear, take my hand, in this silence, where I’ve fallen, show me: Laugh!
Consider this breath, the sound
behind it; consider the open mouth, the next note.
If a scream erupts in a forest, and no one hears it —or if none of the hearers can connect the substance of the scream to the face of the wounded, whether because these hearers are out of sight or otherwise unable to perceive how a body nearby could be capable of keening like that, or because the hearers are not in the habit of connecting the nuanced arrangement of particular human features to the nuanced arrangement of particular human sounds, when considering a particular cry of distress after shutting eyes tight against any witness— did it happen?
Same question may be posed with other variants. If the cry was piercing and potentially recognizable but muffled by the presence of a sudden hand against an open mouth, does it count? If the moment of the cry coincides with the collapse of the known world and the known world in question was once synonymous with the depths of the forest, did a cry even happen, if the place that it would have poured into was suddenly gone?
Now consider other variables. If access is granted, but no one is told, does the person at the gates no one was trying to approach after years of denial get to shrug, raised eyebrows, and claim innocence––based on, well, I didn’t say they couldn’t. . .
Get to: what does this even mean? A body gets to do what it will do until acted upon by an opposing force. Except in the case of survival. Except in the case of protection of children. A body will persist until it can’t, and in persisting, adapt to certain givens for the sake of survival. As in, this door is locked, this knob will burn your hand, this exit will get you shot. If someone on the other side unlocks the door quietly in the middle of the night, hides the key and leaves it closed, is it to be considered open?
Alma Thomas, Grassy Melodic Chant, 1976, acrylic on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Define: cry. Which sounds are included? Define: pains. Which count? Define: life. Which forms are we talking about here, who is screaming––and who has stopped?
Where do these faces go when they leave us? Here’s a better question: why do we keep insisting that they are ours?
If someone shuts their eyes against some never-ending light, can they be considered a witness? If someone builds a dam across a river of time, can it be stopped, and what is the name for the resulting body? And if someone removes a dam and the river moves again, now altered in shape, is the dam still real, or has it been erased?
If eyes trained on sky notice wild promises in stars, do these vows have any bearing once obscured by the light pollution of the empire’s cities?
If breath denied fails to void the depth of inhalation, what do you call the sound that follows? The rising, leaning, lilting unsparing hallelujahs of nobody knows, the forever-present notes that no hand grants and no thief can steal, reaching back to some original promise, in the first splitting of atoms, when it was discovered that the matter they contained was mostly open spaces for the vibration of shimmering notes, haunting the seeming solids behind the spectral gates; what is this?
Consider moving. Listen. Consider this breath, the sound behind it; consider the open mouth, the next note. Sing.
About the artist: Alma Woodsey Thomas, now a renowned figure of African-American art history, had her debut showing at the age of seventy-five, after a thirty-five year career of teaching art to D.C. junior high school students.
Sketching rocks bathed in light since the sun rose, try to remember dawn.
Open fist against graffitied bricks, he watches crows, remembers death. Painted peacock lady smiles over traffic lights; checks the mirror, pouts.
Back-to-back on the park bench, a pair wonders if they are dating yet. Babies bearing swords beat against trees and stones while sandboxes still wait.
Queens rock hi-tops, heads leaning toward hips, and braided babes run. Mob men in trench coats talk business and horses while sirens wail upstairs.
Holiday blue notes shine cool on midnight sidewalks; her walking pace slows. By park fountains he reminded her, What’s the point? ––Meaning, of her rage.
Baby boy finds mama’s stash. She won’t know what he eats, until later. He fell in love: first God, then the ancients, then woman; then he was done.
Don’t tell me what to do, she says, leg crossed over knee. He listens, nods. Bullet clears rib cage to stop against spine; now there is no need for shoes.
If you sit beneath trees long enough with snacks out, squirrels come to eat. Makers cross the street. Meeting halfway, they embrace. Cars honk and they laugh.
Joining foreheads, seated lovers bow, form a heart by the fountain mist. The bracelet was there to remind him to count each memory, but her.
Sketching rocks bathed in light since the sun rose, try to remember dawn.
Notes: The title comes from the painting by Robert Delaunay (1912, oil on canvas; Tate London). The poem came from an exercise done on the seventeenth of the month. In honor of Alan Ginsberg’s American Sentences (A haiku without line breaks, seventeen syllables), I aimed to write seventeen of them. Then I took some liberties with arrangement and punctuation. Sometimes breaking from the sentence (into two or three), I kept lines of seventeen syllables, each aimed toward a particular scene, during a particular twenty-four-hour period, on a particular street, in an imagined city, present day.
What’s wrong? Not seeing anything. Try averted vision.
What books? What size? How far? How much? When? How far? Are we there?
How many inches? Just wait. I have rid myself of rarely used accessories in my garage.
For example? I found out that I did not want to be a mathematician.
What is the best way? Look at your maps. Find a dark country road. In hunting season, be careful!
Traveling alone? You may have to walk. Worth the effort, for dark skies.
Cloud cover? Pay attention. Conditions repeat over time.
How do I––? Look. Use eyes and mind: a technique for seeing. Take a break. Nap. Wash the mirror until the solution drains away.
How about something –for general purposes? No.
Why not? We don’t live in a general-purpose universe.
Brand new equipment! Try it out.
Going all the way! The new bracket does not fit. The drive gear needs more lubricant.
Wasting precious dark sky time? Patience. Try out that new mount before you leave. Be prepared.
Inspiration (and found words/ phrases) from the opening three chapters of: Coe, Steven R. Deep Sky Observing: The Astronomical Tourist. Springer, 2000.
Drunk on abundance, they weren’t ready to accept any limits. They had no practice. It was not as though there was a choice to be made, though later it would be framed as though there had been.
Consider one beginning, how above the blue carpet of a grandmother’s living room, there had been a painting of a small boat in a storm, against a dark sky.
Below this, on a stand, an oversized bible, the pages slightly gilded at the edges; what it meant to wonder, in this place, on a summer afternoon, back against the blue carpet, how it was that anything at all had started, how from this wonder a body might get up and walk to the book on display, turning to the beginning, and puzzling over the words, in awe of the poet’s certainty.
Only words and nothing else until a command came, and then it was Light, and after that, the seas and the forests and the beasts and a man and after him, it is said, from a bone taken from the center of his breathing, a woman; consider learning, how she met him in the garden; consider wondering how they knew how to play, and imagining the horror of living ever after, dying to know it again, after they beheld in the center of the garden, the tree of the knowledge the limits of what they could know. Drunk on abundance, they weren’t ready to accept any limits. They had no practice. It was not as though there was a choice to be made, though later it would be framed as though there had been. In the beginning, knowing nothing but abundance, how can anyone look away when the very source is given, to taste?
They say she bit first. Of course, she would have been the one among the branches, gathering fruit. Later she would be painted as a sinner, but how could she be anything but a child in these original days? Here, someone whispers: serpent, man, or God––in the beginning, does it matter, or is this a moment when it is possible to imagine a single hope, constant as a pulse? How it whispers, like the rustle of leaves at the edge of a branch at late afternoon, “Stay.”
Considering the anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States at this moment I was reminded to return to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting,” which returned me to the hope that inspired this response, this love note to America, for an occasion somewhere between Last Rites and Baptism.
SPARROWS WAITING We were sorting the Grapes of Wrath, waiting for the shift to be done. Our unrest was everywhere: flags and chanting; paint and the piercing of swords into the flesh at the sides of sworn enemies. When was our Last Supper, and when would it return? Wonder, we looked for you everywhere, waiting for our numbers to be called.
The whales waited elsewhere, bleeding oceans back into their ears; do they hear each other through the current of it? We wanted to know what they’d been saying all along after hellos and we wanted to lie down again ––the lovers, the weepers, the dreamers, across the Great Divide, our bodies bridges for the feet that could not believe unless they stepped across us, unless they put their hands in the wounds of their feet in our backs, back to the Lost Continent they’d been trained to disbelieve America, we were waiting for your music for so long that when you hobbled back to the Dark Tower your intimations of immortality bleeding out from stray bullet wounds, your torch arm falling slack, we couldn’t help ourselves America, we circled you, we circled ourselves no one was looking, but we were there; we stood up, our single bodies no longer the bridge it was our hands Now we held them the shape of us unfastened from the overpass ––still, we held, some of us even though the gaps of our form were widening our collective path an open mouth. Eye, be on your sparrow now. Watch us as we stand before ourselves
