with history trapped inside us

from the days of light and thunder

The problem in the highway days was where to begin.
Even the lions we imagined becoming went lame.
Our backs bent early, sights set on oblivion.
War was everywhere. Fathers called it peace.

Developments advanced battalion by battalion
toward the rumored end of history. The weather ecstatic.
Furniture ads relentless. Strip malls glowing
in rivering taillights. The id ran out of land.

A gas station canopy burned red against the dusk.

Mirrors closed into screens. Our drives consumed us.
Who were we to think ourselves architects?

After the getting and spending, what remained
but the shock of touch, the idea of rest?
When the desert bloomed, we misread it—
called it sudden. That was what we knew.

*

This piece recently appeared in Your Impossible Voice, Issue 34

at the hour of the Angelus

after Leonora Carrington

Surely, I carry enough madness for the long voyage, having packed enough pieces, and left some, devilishly scattered about, to make for you a puzzle. From the railing, I scatter some upon the waves like fish bait. They rise and eat and I leave.

Immune to the affliction of telling anyone what I know, I know nothing except that I am a fuzzy form of human animal who will one day die.

For a time, I walked to and from walls of gray sandstone beneath birds of stone. The building is hollowed out now. Only the birds remain. If you approach, as I do sometimes, to paint from memory, they flit between the apertures.

No one is there but the birds, but whoever escapes the childhood home?

A giant goose commands the scene. A horned creature holds a broomstick. Three hooded figures at the table, one in dark glasses at the stove, the red-robed figure at her feet. Corn upon the metate to be ground and served with the fishes the nuns ride in upon.

At the hour of the Angelus, they sing the wild anemones from the woods. I go again to greet them.

undocumented gravities

what bends the fabric

One physicist told me: picture a bowling ball in the fabric,
the fabric caving in—why bodies fall toward one another,

spinning. How spacetime curves. My grandmother spoke of weight
in other ways: the hush between names in an unread ledger of losses.

I finger that line, the jagged edge of scab, the raw grain Ellison heard
scraping every blues. What do I do with this mass of memory

now bending every moment into its warp? She lost her mother
to fog-lung at nine, crossed alone to a house with chandeliers,

quiet corrections. Her eyes went dark when I asked about the war.
She kissed me once, called me her lost sister’s name,

then whispered into the rosary beads drawn from pocket to lips.
A song she didn’t teach me hums in my sleep.

Here is a shape made of silence. A dark bloom:
cells within cells, watched by a thousand quiet endings

spreading? Grief is such a mass, perhaps, when left unspoken:
a metastasis of memory in a land that names the stranger alien.

I am trying to reach mine, cannot find where it begins.
It arrived before language, encoded in the spiral of blood,

older than my name. Like starlight long gone, still arriving.
I squint into the most distant layer of stars: fine dust.

Some of it shines from bodies long dead,
their last emissions only now arriving

here. Their light arrives always without their names
like a jagged, cracked-open ledge,

this brief flesh against it,
struggling to sound.

*

This poem recently appeared in Sky Island Journal, Issue 35.

without the use of now

after an unlived hour

She lived in the hour. He kept it for later.

The body learns. At first by leaning—tentative, offering its small faith in the moment, then less so.

The mouth that hungers for bread learns the shape of waiting. How to soften the edge of asking. What it means to accept how he forgot—not by cruelty, but by being nowhere at all when it mattered.

When it mattered: paper towels, toilet paper, the coffee gone. The latch he knew needed fixing, leaving someone to know they were still at risk while he knew it, did nothing. This is how absence accumulates: a field of what must be thought of by someone.

He is many things, most of them possible. In the end, he is not that someone. Not careless—that would imply contact. Something else. Drawn again into the bright perimeter of what might be.

No idea so good as the next idea. No plan like the one untried. No life like the one he has yet to begin—this one, finally, worthy of him.

Meanwhile, she begins to sort what can be carried; what must be thrown away; what cannot be asked for again. The body keeps score even when the mind refuses.

At the water, he is something else again. Watch how he rides the wave cleanly, beautiful in it, held by the same force that could take a life. He does not look back—not by choice, but because the frame does not include it.

Behind him, outside the shot, someone learns the cost of air.

Later, he will say it was a good day and mean it. Tomorrow, he announces, will come. The other day he speaks of is always the one that has the best of him.

Never this one. Never the hour that asks to be met.

Here, he is a maker of atmosphere. A summoner of possibility. He can speak a future into near belief. Who would not follow that voice. Who would not, once or twice, be pulled back into its hold.

He kept himself intact for a future unveiling. Called this becoming.

She lived among the opened things: torn roll, empty shelf, the latch that would not catch. Her body learned how not to lean.

He did not think himself absent. Where he lived, the hours gathered for his arrival. Nothing began until he did.

Her questions thinned, then fell away. In their place: the work. The hour, arriving whether held or not, asked to be lived by someone.

Years passed. From time to time, he spoke again of beginning.

She, already inside the life of daily flesh, did not answer.

Departures (Unconfirmed)

arrivals not recorded

to fly was all he wanted––to sail the boat unfurl the wings, kissing wind; fast and faster across the land of the sometimes sure, sure enough

to fly again, he demanded––to where was insignificant––to hurl headfirst toward some invisible purpose, hard and harder across the land of the dream

i listened, how some record the songs of birds at the brink before they go, taking notes, noting what it took to know how he would stay flying fast and lost in the land of the dream from which i decided to go

quickly but soft, & likely unnoticed until one day when he wakes with a sense that something

happened, how it seemed real like a song

so real (he could almost hear it now!) or (maybe then!) or at the time of some other when, when he one day once upon a time got around to listening to what was somewhere (wasn’t it?) close enough he could almost sing it, there from the tip of his tongue

and later means to name what is leaving, to trace somehow its contours, but what is gone is good and gone and has no edge but what returns to the initial wish––

fly

notes from any weekday afternoon

on arriving after the high point

Here comes a familiar question. So now what? It’s  the end of the long part of the day and the beginning of the part where I mean to redeem some of the best of me. But the glass is empty too soon, and here’s a challenge. If I don’t rush past it, a response waits. Saying, now you try to make. Something, but not today. Today I want to open the notebook, the laptop, the inbox and find it already made.

In the Mass, there was a moment after the bells and before communion that some called the High Point, where we said I am not worthy to receive, but say the word. It came after the part where my grandma would whisper, Lord, I believe. Heal my unbelief.

I return each evening in a diminished form, somehow. Determination is not the posture of prayer, but of the glossy ad. It makes demands, offers vapid encouragement, relentless goading on. Get yourself together, this part insists. How can you be finished if it isn’t even dark? How when others are just beginning, can you be done for the day?

True, this day started at four, and then came everything I will not list. I mean to get beyond all of this. Here comes Dante again, interrupting a line of thought with whispers of how the dark wood were better followed, translated. I am inclined to agree, but keep finding concrete corridors, fluorescent track lighting, deafening bells. The railings and the gates and the traffic keep me moving over leveled ground, but airless, crawling in this steady stream.  I eddy again among the bent ones, each of us shouldering the rest of the day forward until it turns on an eventual collapse, and comes back for us, again.

as if the work could be finished

notes toward a twelfth labor

He arrives where the land has already been opened. He finds its emptiness arranged as a promise.

With the trees set back, the ground marked in faint lines where something will be placed, he stands there a moment longer than necessary, as if waiting to be recognized.

There is always a first task, though no one agrees what it is. In some tellings, it begins with a body—muscle against fur, breath against breath. In this one, it begins with a diagram. A way through.

He studies the problem until it yields its names. The lion appears as resistance. The hydra as recurrence. The hind moves just beyond permission, luminous and uncatchable, and so he follows. This is not about taking, he insists. He means to learn the pattern of this place. He keeps a careful distance. The distance defines this story.

There are places he is told not to enter, and yet. What kind of a hero would he be if he listened? He rebrands his defiance as a mark of nobility, enters gently.

The birds lift at his approach—metal, this time—circling back with images of what cannot be held at ground level. He watches himself from above, a figure moving through a field of tasks. It steadies him, this second vantage. It confirms the shape of his intention.

From here, the river is no body, but a solution. When it turns, when it carries what was meant to be cleared, he marks the success and looks away from where it goes.

There is a belt he must take without breaking what it binds. There are mares whose mouths open at the edge of hunger. There is a dog at a threshold that does not understand passage, only guarding. He speaks to it as if it might recognize him.

No, he is not cruel. This is what complicates things. He believes in the work, in the ordered sequence of steps and in the way each task, once named, can be approached and completed. He believes there is a version of himself at the end of it who will stand in a different light, having moved something essential.

Sometimes he imagines that figure: arms open, at a height just sufficient to prove ascent.

He does not imagine the fall, except briefly, as a flicker at the edge of his vision. By way of correction, he reviews the plan, turns to other images. These are readily available.  

Here is one now. A man in a doorway upends a table. Dust rises behind a horse. A voice intones surrender, means dominion. He carries these as permissions. He arranges them carefully, so they do not contradict. 

At night, the tasks loosen and the numbering slips. He finds himself back at the beginning, unclear how he returned. The land is less arranged now, and its studied lines have blurred. Something moves at the edge of sight, as if something had been here all along, waiting. Not a beast, exactly, but its presence implies some refusal of the entire project. 

He stands without instruction and for a moment nothing is named and he does not reach for a tool.

Then the light shifts, and he begins again.

where we stood, watching

on those who mistook their heights for flight

Consider this, we tried—but held still when they raged. We were about to say babies, offer skillets, call on memory. We learned to hold our words, to stand instead, ever ready with arms at our sides, palms open. We held them through their nightmares and when they raged that we knew nothing of their wars.

They did not come toward us. Their bodies knew a direction, some center pointing, but they had trained themselves away from it.

We waited for a decision that did not arrive. No more war at the threshold, or bringing it home, or calling its conquest flight. We held our tongues, tasting blood and what. We could not say. Stay, we pressed, a whisper. It was not a command, but a reminder of contact with the living. Here, we said, and offered skin. A reminder of how tender the flesh that holds us here, how barely.

Their systems grew intricate. Machineries of belief meant to lift them, and we grew tired of these heights, sensing the fall pre-written.

Milk leaked. Children cried to them—look, see me—but the angle was wrong. Too low. Sometimes they would lift a child as if testing the weight. We held our breath.

Our bodies became passage—grease for the next idea, pillows where their heads had been. We learned to move on. 

The next thing was the children. They wanted to fly, too, but we did not throw them. Not with one on each hip, a basket of laundry, onions cut open on the board.

Here is where they stepped in, who were here so briefly. To do the throwing. Up! They lifted. Up, up! they shouted. 

The children screamed. Again!

aerial view

aerial view of an edge

What is this cut––eye of churned earth,
a cyclone pattern, continuance replaced
by some other hand.

How am I seeing, at this height. To look from above
at the place where I might, in another version,
be standing instead.

To learn something from this
—as once, a child, dreaming of flight,
hovered above her mother

in the supermarket’s fluorescent hum,
watched her push the cart
through pale green heads of wrapped iceberg,

bright torpedoes of cucumber
& claw-tied lobsters in their tank.
Between her mother & the ceiling’s light,
she learned distance.

Capillary of shale, piled.
A filament around the iris, worn thin.
Closer down, something else.

A spine. Whose? The engineers arrive
to play king, to play prophet,
to name inheritance into being,

city of gold, encased behind glass.
The glass, compressed sand
the diggers come to move.

They call it dirt. They call it mud.
They handle what little they see,
then leave.