Category: Wonder

Storm Surge

And a turning point.

In the waiting room, I wanted

to say–––something, because

such places, with their anxious hum

always seem to want relief. From

the pretense of containment,

or into song. But when it was time

I left and the hot wind hit

my eyes which slid across

folded falcon wings as if

to learn how my own hands

clutching plastic bags

might know that poise.

A nest nearby, its swallow

gone, a lilting plainsong

behind me. I turned, eyes

wide, to trace the mouth

of the storm’s long suggestion

in the ears as though to 

blow me empty. Howl,

I wanted then, as now, to 

share some sighting 

with another face.

Holler

From an undersea expanse.

It started above ground. Then we

worked the present’s peace, as

the storm and life went on until

the whole story was underwater.

The lens moved to track the current,

the coral, its choral lives. The lens

was intelligent. It saw us. We

looked back, our entire lives

before us, now beyond speech,

the brave vessels of our knocking

hearts still moving by the word. 

We held new names inside us,

hinting at what we were and to

what we were being returned. 

Down we went. At last, 

there was no time before this

but our remembrance, and some

would make trespass of memory

holding it close, would hear its

first utterance in the water, like

Mother            even now, in

this constant dusk the day 

still breaking in my––– 

But she said:

                        Hush,

don’t speak to me of

souls. Not here, at this

late hour. Only hold.

The Name

To say the word.

And you said to me, go back

and I returned where you told me

to myself, the soul’s eye looking.

The awe of it, and all of it unknown. 

But I wanted solid things in space,

a place to own. I looked long and

it was true, then. There was no place

to rest this head. 

You said the word and it left me

and I am locked away now, far

from that mother, that tongue. 

Take me back.  

***

Inspired by Augustine’s Confessions.

Bread

And the heart of the matter.

They come to see us, hungry for our size.

Look at our faces. We tower. They dance.

One says, walk slower. One says, closer.

There are more of us now, as though prayers.

Into clouds. No command is needed from this height.

They sing us. A dirge, they sing for beloveds

and the birds call back. From their ovens,

the smell of bread. When they taste,

they will look. Up, they will see us,

our suspended faces

against sky. 

***

Inspired by a recent New York Times article about Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater.

You Are Here

Trying to read the map.

Some of the old masters believed the ear outlived the heart, so they would sit with the dead forty days, giving directions. We didn’t expect that kind of treatment, given the times. We thought we had better get to where we knew the map. 

We weren’t sure what to make of the artist’s work, so asked. There is something unknown in you, she said. She wanted us to see it. We asked her if she was sure about that and she laughed, shaking her head. We did not always know how to talk to the artist. 

In one series, she created shapes from mathematical theorems, but we took them for angels. The effect was like walking in a cathedral. We wanted to know how she did it. Something happens, she said. But when I work, I do not think of things.

I wish you could see it, and we asked what. How the void is the place where you stand, she said, and left us. We are still here, looking. 

***

Inspired by the work of Dorothea Rockburne.

Blank Space

And nobody’s wind.

It was the last evening of the break, and it was nothing.

How I loved it, remembering now. 

The walks we took back and again to the car, checking

on things we forgot, returning empty-handed to share

our mutterings with the cat and laughter over

your particular socks and your ice cream

and the way you pretended not to sleep

and the show we watched was stupid

and we kept on repeating its lines

laugh-crying over nothing and I didn’t even write

a page, only opened a file and closed it

I could feel the time closing for this and now wonder

if it’s what’s left undone in a place that sanctifies. 

I will miss this, the lack of pretense

that we were anything but here

breathing in it.

Variabilities

Of similar forms.

Considering the history of a given set of bodies, the artist posed a question. Where are the bones of the bones? she asked us, and we knew our nakedness an extension of a larger shadow, casting us out. Once in it, we danced something more than imitation. The camel’s eye our needle, we stitched our skeletons into new visions of before to scatter our tomorrows until we lost their tracks and had to make them new again. 

***

Inspired by the work of Nancy Graves.

One Hope

For what may shine.

That you may one day know a lens not terror, a posture not crouched, sounds neither siren nor drone, and weathers unrhymed with death count. Food to offer, not to reap, and time as a ladle to be passed to the tune of Here, take it. Take what you need. Did you get enough? when no host will rest until everyone is so full that they lose the count, numbers blurring back into beginning, and no one thinks to save the light for when it leaves us.

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