Monthly Archives: June 2011

What splintered the limb
from the tree, rent
the watercolor-tinted
blooms from their base?

The bird that perches there now
will not say, though its call makes
a bright edge of noise: little rip
of paper sailing through the leaves.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“Take courage, Holy Parents of Pharcitae, udes adonitas — no one is immortal.”
~ Inscription in the Cave of the Coffins, Beit She’arim

Bindwood, lovestone, grief’s greenest eraser:
see how the slightest wind ruffles the ivy.
See how they flourish on walls, erupt

in every breach, more unruly than graffiti.
So many signatures, cascading. In the trees,
a bird sings one, sad note and snaps

a brown moth out of the air. Who
authors the scope of what can be seen
or told? I read how Newton took a bodkin

and put it betwixt the eye and the bone
as neare to the backside of his eye as he could.
Imagine the circles of color that pulsed

beneath his lids on the verge of light:
white darke, blewish darke. The eye
was not hurt, he wrote. Though at the fall

of feathers, a sifting of soft dust
from the sill or the eaves, the hand
instinctively flies up to cover the face—

So the green tendrils pin their fragile
geometry against the gate, admitting
what the soul has done in its defense.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Listen closely. Small halos dropping out of the leaves, little tambourine

sounds. A catbird mimics the wood thrush. Follow it into the thicket,

follow it into the vines. Or sing to it, to make it come.

Ghost of a call, ghost of an answer. A music teacher

told me once, Phrasing is all. But also I love

what falters and stops, starts again. Trying, always trying.

Water so green, it’s audible. It wants so much, because it can.

At night, lamps are lit at the kitchen window and the dark

spools behind like a trail for moths. Here they come,

drunk with the light and beating their lovely wings.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

“O how sweet to be reincarnated as dreams,
Dreams that help us forget,
the resentment awaiting between the bow and arrow.”
~ Buland Al-Haidari

Ambivalence: The sun puts in its first
appearance. The cricket in the garden
adjusts its bow and twangs.

A memory: I am seven, dressing for school, trying to push
one foot into my patent leather shoe. Bump in the toe:
out jumps a hairy spider the length of my little finger.

Enchantment: The mirrored lyre shapes
on the neighbor’s garden gate. The golden
retriever that used to walk with its owner every day.

Desire: When I have my own garden I will plant
a Golden Rain Tree and a Keffir Lime,
a row of slender Gingkos.

Emerging: Some leaves will turn from flamingo pink
to green then melted butter at the close of summer.
Some leaves are dark with a glossy sheen.

Dreaming: I’ll pluck long branches hung
with orange husks of paper lanterns.
I’ll line the air with zest of skins.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

The Hubble telescope lifts into space to take luminous photos of the heavens.

And that summer, on the eve of the World Cup Finals, the three tenors sing under the stars in the ancient baths of Caracalla.

Less than ten days later, the earthquakes in our city, the number of dead exceeding the number of caskets and funeral parlors. Tent cities in the park surrounded by little moats of mud. The scramble for drinking water and blankets, powdered milk for children. Flies, not technology, lead rescuers to those trapped in rubble. Later they speak of drinking rain, dew, piss.

Fallen beams, cracked firewalls: the house we lose. And lose again, after the second loan and desperate sale. But the jasmine continues to bloom, the rampant bougainvilleas climb the walls.

The spotted owl is added to the threatened species list.

My father, fallen into a coma, is rushed to the hospital. I remember he was wearing his saffron yellow bathrobe threaded through with ochre. There would have been a novena to St. Pancratius in one of its pockets; and his rosary of cracked wooden beads.

Just the evening before, we’d dared to return to disheveled rooms to lie down on our beds. We did not take off our shoes because of the aftershocks. He’d stood in the doorway then, saying little, smiling in his solemn way. Which was almost not smiling at all unless you knew him.

The first contraceptive implant is approved by the FDA. Smoking on domestic airplane flights is banned. And Jack Kevorkian assists his first patient to die.

And then in August, Iraq invades Kuwait and war is on everyone’s lips, even there. My friend B. changes into camouflage-print dungarees and says over and over again, “This is it, Maria. This is it.” In the streets, the sound of blasting, drilling, jackhammers.

Grocery store shelves empty from spasms of panic buying. As if the fragile balance of the world rested on the number of tins of canned meat in the basement, the bottles of hoarded water, the sacks of rice. The neighbors are guarded; they take care not to mention how much they have.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Garland of flowers and beads, of prayers
and breaths, rosary of alleviation—

even the gnats dancing in deep shade
figure somehow into this calculus.

But today I am past counting.
Today I want only to inhale

what comes to musk, especially
at evening. Even the crow flicks open

its dark parasol and wings away.
The river stones lie quietly under water:

not quite weightless but small
enough to turn and bevel at the edges.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.