Yes, I am still writing
about my mother. About my
mothers. About the ways
in which they became
who they were to me; but
long before that: to, for,
and from each other. How
not even the years can fade
the quality of their scent,
the gestures that remain
embedded in every piece
of furniture, in every green
ceramic mixing bowl that survived
the years of their marriage to make
its way into mine, with all
the hairline cracks spread across
the surface. Yes, I am still
writing about my questions, about
the thousand thousand ways a whisper
carries even in the absence of wind
from out of the depths of a cabinet
emptied of its secrets. Because
the end of a story is only
convention, because convention
dictates whose names may appear
on registers and documents
and deeds, as well as who
doesn't get to inherit.
But inherit we all do—if not
the shape of an eyebrow
then the places moles turn up,
giveaway signs on the map
of the weathering body: saying
you too have a penchant for men
of a certain age, or you too
love the texture and frill
of a garment for the way
it seduces the mind into thinking
it might forget what histories
groped and penetrated you in that
loamy dark before you came to be.
Locusts
"A single swarm can contain up to 150 million
locusts per square kilometer of farmland." - Associated Press
They are not dark tears from a pharaoh's eyes,
nor a belt of bees unloosed from a titan's
distant tower. Their flight path is not
a channel clogged with vessels of trade
or commerce. They are together
a dark body on whose surface is a mouth
made of very fine short hairs. They sense
the quality of air and can hover
for days and days in the wind.
They are said to be patient
and can withstand extended periods
of deprivation. Along the edges of the sky
they find small openings in which
they can spiral without cease. How many
creatures can hear the sounds of the world
and of frightened cows through the ear
in their abdomen, or feel the color green?
Talk
Talk, we say.
Why don't we know
how to talk. Nobody says
anything, or nobody says
what anyone really wants
to hear or to say under
the words. It's like
trying to figure out how
to lift the hem of rain
as it lengthens, coming
down. We cup our hands:
there is so much of it
we cannot hold.
Therefore, Am
Mount Vesuvius eruption: Extreme heat
"turned man's brain to glass" - BBC News
Before the blanket and surge,
before the seared
arms of trees. We would have been
face-down in bed, lying
along the sandbar, wondering
at the rattle in the throat
of the sky and the sudden
radiance, distilling all
we ever knew or remembered.
Uncovered from sand—obsidian
sliver, spherulites, feldspar.
Evacuation
of the bees from hives
collapsing from within;
of the mouse-sized dunmarts
and cockatoos, the wallabies
and koalas that firefighters
worked feverishly to save;
of the towns that woke
as the mouth of a crater
spewed pent-up heat
and ash; of the blood or
of the bowels and their
discharge from the body:
of the organs made empty
or void; of the place
or position one used to hold
but is now forced to abandon
or give out; of withdrawal
from a place in some
orderly fashion,
for safety or in
surrender.
Depth Perception
There's an experiment I read about
where they laid a sheet of Plexiglas
like a bridge between two raised,
solid surfaces, and coaxed babies
to crawl across to the other side.
Some of them trustingly made
their way; a few were hesitant,
because they were confused
about the drop they perceived
though their hands told them
there should be nothing to doubt.
What is space anyway but a checker-
board of moments that light
can melt or fracture? A staircase
swings around to the other side
of the hall and back down to its
starting point. A hand is a hand
but a pair can turn into wings.
In Praise of Rain
I saw
a photograph
of animals praising
the rain that finally
fell on their nearly
scorched backs— they
raised up themselves
on their hind legs
& their fore-
legs made a kind
of tent above
their heads &
no one saw
where they went
afterwards but
after the fire they
left hoof prints
in the clay
Fable
(with a line from Louise Erdrich)
All the fables I recall end
with an illustrated moral: not so much truth, not
beauty nor patience, but more an
idea of choice. For instance, the youngest daughter
could choose to defy the father
who wants to give her to some beast of a man who has him
disturbingly in his thrall, and over
half the village as well. Or she could choose to
end the narrative early, refuse
the role of sacrifice. But the way these stories go,
fairest equals having the least
freedom to assert a difference in worldview.
Given three gates and the knowledge
that behind one lurks a lion waiting to tear you
heart from limb, and behind the second
a flaming sword: only one leads to the mythical
island where all that the heroine
has lost shall be restored. We should all be so lucky:
jinn in a hip pocket, an app
to scan terrain ahead in real time. After weeks of fire,
kangaroos praise the rain
that finally pours from the heavens. Elsewhere: pooled
lava gushes from the earth; sulfur
and ashes spew out of a volcano in a crater lake, one of
many in the ring of fire. Who'd
willingly choose disaster, stay behind while
neighbors flee to evacuation
shelters? By an act of God, we mean what's
out of the range of our control,
outside further capacity to choose. All my life I've tried to
play the parts that I've been given,
seen how to turn accidents into opportunities or salvage
quests gone awry. But you know?
The heart can only take so much
repetition without relief.
The heart wants to sometimes not have to choose, instead
surrender; to not pretend to know
all the answers, or where to find them;
to quietly admit there's only
so much it can do, despite the largeness of its desire,
unstinting hope, unlimited
ambition. I read about someone sitting under an apple tree,
vivid witness to fruit
taken past ripeness and falling toward rot in heaps,
wasting their sweetness.
And yet somehow not one was wasted, not even those
exempt from the maw assigned
to eat them whole, take them alive.
You try to be like the fruit: you give
as much as you can in leaf, in flower,
zest and bud, before you too are taken.
Before Joy
Before joy, the moments that could be
but are clearly not yet joy. The pause,
the windless plain; then, curtain
after curtain saying not this one yet,
perhaps the next. You might as well
slow down and learn all this other
rhetoric of passing for. The orator,
speaker, teacher, master, pulls
a line of knotted squares
from out of the liquid air; look how
they ripple, peach and lime-green,
burnished gold. You love most
the moment before or the moment
after because it is how you know
something bloomed briefly there.
Verdict
Everything I said in the throes
of darkness was taken from me,
then turned into a cloth
of a different weave. Try
as I might, I could not return
the original color of my speech
or thought. I touched the out-
line of my knuckles and felt
with the tip of my tongue
the small gaps between
my teeth. I wondered how
others could be so sure
of themselves, how quickly
they could call up different
selves and still say I: one
wearing the coat of self-
righteous fury, another the robes
and gavel of a judge; a gallery
of hairy gods who, out of boredom,
paper the gates with fireflies.