A few hours ago, I learned it was Lucille Clifton’s birthday, and thought immediately of her beautiful “Blessing the Boats.” Then I knew what to do with what I was meaning to notice, from yesterday’s time at Balboa Park, which is right near San Diego’s airport, where the planes fly very low.
May the sky
that tears above us
every ten minutes
with the next landing
hold you still
in its infinities, barely
contained. May you notice
the webs noiselessly repaired
in the shade-giving tree.
May you hold the noise
and feel its impact, understand
what it means to live
in the time of tearing skies
and then turn your ears
to the hush of leaves against
leavings, expanding in chorus
above you and to the hawks
overhead, and then to the drums
beneath the tree down the hill. Watch
––the dancers in unison and each
their own, leaves singing the leaving
of an ancient dance, remembered
in chorus in ways that it may never be,
alone, in the place you go first to notice
the dead
before they are named.
May you see
the bird on the low, long branch,
how violently its blood-red breast sways
with each new tear in the still-aching
sky. May you study like these near the drums,
those songs that time and distance and generations
of death would have killed by now if they had not
recognized, first alone and then in chorus,
how the only way to mark the days of
separation by sea and torn sky
is by gripping what moves beneath you
as you grip what moves through you, as
the same song, the same flight, holding
first until you can move into it, even as
you notice each fresh wound, tearing a
body you once thought eternal, prone to
capricious moods but never injury, and
may you know how something new happens
now, even if: the wound is real and yes, it is
another man with a sword, eager to pierce
the next heaven, and you know what this
is because flesh won’t forget, insisting against
its own small space, on dancing eulogies in
concert
with the still uncounted souls waiting
here, beneath this torn heaven, for the next
sign, and may you trace it, holding the line and
waiting to carry it, may you wait and hold, listen
and then cry out when the time is right, as the hawks
above have been doing ever since you arrived, finding
in the act of swaying with each pointed arrival, each
still-dripping wound, some way to recognize,
even as you feel each cut from your crown
to your feet, how none ever sever you from it.
May you hold your hands up, open to
these wounded forevers,
and sway.
