Where murmuration
of birds under dark sky
is often invisible
without obsidian mirror,
a tiny cloud glimmers,
poised to rain a single
poem.
Under Waters
As above
Category: poetry
Every Grain
Our sands
With bone worn backs we huddle
in the shadow of empire, nursing
unborn stars, to beg the question:
how many dawns remain? Against
vain attempts to tame the hungers
of that constant, mechanical mouth,
its gaping hole the void in the centers
where we once met beneath another
sun, in another time, before time was
eaten too, to be excreted in legions
of micro units, meted out in
increments
of perceived
worth.
Why this?
Answers to FAQs.
Why this?
For these moments
I brace with an answer.
So dumb when it comes
to the ways of this place
that I carry a cheat sheet.
It says: taste, tear,
bear the weight because
you know yourself a floating
thing, prone to flying off,
unable to land. The terror
of losing touch with
gravity. Because that dark
beyond those clouds
is thick with the pull
of entropy, into some
chaos and I don’t know
what, away from here
the place of sweat
and laundry and alarms
and a lot of driving to
and from places in cars
with their warning lights
and trying to park
and getting overdraft
notices and the most recent
thing to break today is a blood
vessel in the eye and that little
hinge that’s supposed to keep
the door from opening too wide
and obviously this heart and
at least one of these is going
to stay broke and too far open
all the time.
Suns
And lovers
How much depends
on the timing of a tear
in the fabric of wing?
How much on the drip
of wax?
How much on the hunger
of an eye, craving reunion
with the nearest star.
Earshot
Within them in us.
It was a ceremony. It was hearing. We were pilgrims and wanted to be heard. As now, in hope of returning––somewhere. It seemed we shared this. A common dream? Maybe. Of a time when we were. Uncertain, we did not speak, but listened, the echo of our assembly in our flesh, resounding.
Keepers
After Jorge Luis Borges
You forking paths, tongued by seekers
who pose over volumes, boring into our flesh
read the sins of fathers in our pages, see
me a harlot waiting to happen, a hope unleashed
are binding us––feet, knees, waists, necks
you stitch the skins of us tight, fisting the pages
certain you know what you’ve read, certain
you know us, that we may unleash what dreams
may come to the unfettered flesh, unbound, to
understand the soft-footed silence, treading near
my unshed pages saved from the burn, awaiting
language to make ourselves into all that you fear will––
?
*
The first word in each line comes from a sentence in Andrew Hurley’s translation of Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” (“You who read me, are you certain you may understand my language?”).
Eventide
Orison
Before the starlight-swum sea
foam-feathered, crashing––
we held our shored skins
for saving.
Echo
In an aftermath
Maybe what lasts after endings is this
wind as song stripped of technique
bells as sound of fallen leaves, light
a riot of color, firing life–––––––
and stars as receivers who curve
long necks of shine to hear each
prayer in context at a distance
to reveal how this planet for now
at any given moment still pulses
with these voices of us reminding
us please–– and dear–– and help––
beyond the beyonds of this all.
Aspiration
Apprentice
That these ears would open at an angle to mirror the eloquence of the tree bowing to violin the wind.
Solute
To dissolve some absolution
Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.
But what do you want, always?
What does Always want?
I am impatient to know.
Please speak slowly.
I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.
The phrase “bonebound island” comes from The Notebooks of Dylan Thomas.