of a life
so much before me happens
& by the time i arrive, i am
primed to recognize how
small i am
& after many years
of carrying this
imagined burden to
consider, with
considerable relief
––how
relevantly so,
and know
how fragile, too––
and yet, somehow
still here, a
spore of moss
on wet & craggy
rock to mark
this shore.
if it goes like this what now
the week for learning
how it was death
been knocking
on my nerves
was the week for learning
how
now might be
an entry into this
high time
to set some things
down and go
into that long channel
with high archways
of blue-white ice
where a single bird silhouette
flaps waiting, high above
& also you
in that passage
where we can’t take what
with us when we
go
opening notes of a survey
you can see us in Goya where
cannibal Time eats his children
hooded sisters pointing
to the door, bodies swallowed
by earth as if by probing black
in earnest, he would find
courage to move the brush
Rothko called them performers
Lorca waited on a ghost
to let it harness him by words
& when nowhere stood still we
gathered in twos and threes
hoping to hear the heart
of one living beat hard time
into heat where a mind’s
nerve breaks
a call or cry we wanted
to respond & drummed
an ache the tenderness
of those faces spectacular
& then it was late
all eyelids and moons
o death how
you insinuate
afters
when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped
& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only
took up song again, with all words
wronged
upright, back braced, throwing
notes
to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond
meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch
she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone
from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond
the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,
becoming something else, enough
light to make shade
like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch
each branch like a river she knew
when him once
before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost
song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird
to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry
from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore
to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.
spectacle, witness, aftermath
The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.
They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.
My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.
My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week.
She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched.
Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end.
They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.
how, singing?
Hello, bird. Without your forest, you sing a loop from a wire. From where I stand, your presence is a nagging question. Where to live now. How?
Innovating breath
Although they, too, would later be lumped––by clumsy taxonomies and antimicrobial prejudice––into a category of creature commonly jeered as pestilence, these tiny pioneers had the chutzpah to dare to take into themselves what all others knew as poison and we now call breath, and life, and living. At the arrival of the great oxidation event, one might imagine the others on the planet lamenting the end. Meanwhile, these guys were like, and now. . . here’s green!
Dear friend, with birds
When we last spoke it was to let you know I wished you love. I meant it, knowing we would not speak again while you were in that life, warring at the end, to defend your fortress.
I hope that when you went, the solace of those trees you watched, with whom you often grieved, gave you shade and took your sorrows. I hope the birds were there too, singing, and that at least one of them gave you a good and hearty laugh.
Love is funny how it moves and feints. Those beams when they come can sometimes be too bright to bear. I hope that in that company, that laughter, that light breached your heavy walls, and took you in. I think it did because I am seeing you again.
And hearing range.
I know, love. The anxieties are legion.
But for now, I would like if you could
return to me the absence of my face
from where you’ve been hanging
these ghosts on its edges like
draperies to keep out the draft.
I rather like the velocity of that chill.
I have other uses for these bones.
I want to feel the air run through them.
It is something else, the air.
But that word is the custom
in this place.
I try using terms you know
––air, face, bones––
because the rest will not
translate.
Tracing elements
How frequently I am reminded, by calligraphies beyond my reach, that I have come from nothing and will return. Blood has its own cadence, impatient with vastness. It will only sing against the fabric of its containment and we, these imperfect vessels––hold, dancing at the edge of a dark pit. There is gravity to it, pulling. What resists will not name itself in a language I can recognize. Meanwhile, this music.
