notes toward a minor crossing
one day
I will tell you in music
what I mean
and show
by the curve
of my bowed back
this violin
and wait
while you remember
and say
by this instrument—
listen
I will show you
the sound a bird means
singing
above her heart
pounding
too fast
for you to follow
while alive
and I will say gently
try baby
and for a moment
you will
and you will
try baby
still alive
(meaning what?)
then
you will know
what I mean
enough
for us to leave
and be still again
on address and absence
behind sheets of
[redacted]
child
what is your
true name?
before him
There is a way to abide,
knowing this is all there is:
to protect, understanding
that one of us needs to be
the adult in the room.
Morning
Somewhere behind a fence
a child, still breathing, dares
to ask.
Against annihilation
Love, stop carrying your grave on your shoulders.
Please, love––and start the story over
from the constant beginning where you knew,
love, the only end worth its means––
when you could still translate its sound
in the art of your fluttering hands.
Telling home.
When the night does not end by shatter of night, but by sunrise,
and beneath this sun, roots hold, if a son of the land should
find beside him a living daughter and beneath the sun, root
to hold beneath the land of ruins and holding, find water––
and if the water should make it to the lips of a child in time,
the child may yet grow. To tell a story. It will begin: We lived.
And the still living will hear it and be moved. To sing it back,
hands to the sun, We––
Of flesh and earth.
Here comes another to be named,
where naming will not capture
her back. This is some other place now,
where the mountaintop froze above
its consecrated ground, above
these walls, their trumpets,
our removal.
Alice wakes, weeping snowmelt.
How easily we reason, but
this sight may come too late.
Blind mice run from the knife.
and here is our mirror-girl again,
after the rabbit. Heralds, run.
The gaze is silver. Its illuminating fire
now spent.
We figure one another out of living,
from a dream not remembered.
Take off your shoes, daughter.
Drip tears into ash. Time leaks
a sermon from the eyes
of its messengers where words
are impossible, back into the open
mouth.
Heart on display.
How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––
to give me away
like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––
like she is eager to give me away
to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!
And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.
And I hear.
On being here.
Plant the crab in the sky. You must do this regularly, every season. Now the archer. Pay attention to the bull looking back and follow the gaze of the frog. Notice the tide. Tonight, it glows in full bloom and the cat snake dives gold into wormhole. Follow the fish where it echoes you back. Give recklessly of your abundance and hold fast only to your name. May it tether you to what may never be pronounced. May this be what keeps you, always.
Sights for the sore.
When the pigeons come near the bench, a white-haired lady tossing crumbs from her lap begins to laugh when a lone mallard approaches. You too? she says. Okay, okay. Then come three or four other ducks. Sure, sure, she tells the first, bring your friends. There is enough.
Down the path, a toddler turns from his red rubber ball, and now he is coming too, the others behind him. In the distance, a train sound. Uh-oh, says the boy, and then turns back to the birds. Hands open, arms out. The woman laughs again.
