Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Look at the birds of the air...
~ Matthew 6:26
They do not sow and neither
do they
reap Nor can they
add or take away
from a single
hour of my life
Yet they
clock the seasons and make
on the sky a moving
wonderment of letters
A language of such
quick punctuation
I understand
is the nature of belief
One wing tilts
The river follows
Meaning through your mother's
bloodstream
at birth
Or through lactation
Mouth closed around a notch
a node
to catch warm
milky spurt
But now you are of
an age
with scant
or nonexistent childhood
records
When did your skin stipple
with so much burn and loneliness
How many years
did you see that double-stranded
shadow
helix behind closed lids
This condition
supposed to be endemic
in your part of the world
Spherical and enveloped
Cells flood the brick-colored organ
Your hands helpless against the
flutter
as if some otherworldly
force came nightly to feast
Then in the morning
the thing grown back
And you
bound to the rock
Your own eternal
observer
"...Now the universal whole is a body; for our
senses bear us witness in every case that bodies
have a real existence; and the evidence
of the senses... ought to be the rule of our
reasoning about everything which is not
directly perceived."
- Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 39
Unnerving
The clean
puncture
they drove
into your hip
bone
Larger than the eye
of a tapestry needle
smaller than
a bullet hole
If the soul
according to Epicurus
is a rush of atoms
scattered through the body
If the body
like the universe is
indivisible
then
time must slow down
at that atomic level
But sense
perception provides
evidence
Only a blot of dried crimson
on the square of gauze
The soul did not leak
out of the body
Tangible soul
Ethereal body
Who knows if it hid
in the breath
or a follicle of hair
Have you forgotten what it's like
to be a body unhomed, untethered,
unguarded?
Sometimes, I admit,
I have been shameless. Haven't you
ever begged favors on behalf of those
you love?
Nothing preposterous—
only things like friendship
and time; words for a wound,
space for a grieving.
A snail
finds its way to the windowsill;
its slow track, also a seam.
You are not weak
to leave
traces of where you struggled
against the ground of being.
In rows, on gurneys separated by curtains.
Low chirps, erratic lines, collective
beeping. Are you here for the apple
grown large in your throat, the flushed
ladders climbing up your thighs; the furry
moth trapped in the elevator of your windpipe,
the tattoo artist hiding in your blood? A nurse
attaches a device to the tip of your finger.
Another threads a clear liquid into your
vein. What day is it? You count with her
in reverse from ten, and wind up in some
backforest where you'll sink without
resistance into the moss. How much
time were you there? You were opened
like a book, cut into a cross-section,
made porous as a sheet of cheese. Now
your hip bone sings like a flute.
The sun is starting
to build summer rooms
Bare heads take on the sheen
of copper
the depth of graphite
About the war memorial the artist said
she wanted to cut open the earth
polishing its open sides
like a geode She wanted a way to begin
walking
toward the encounter with
loss
Last night as I hunched my shoulders I felt
a slight deepening behind the ridge
of my collarbone
My thumb fit into it
lying down
Already the body looks
toward the scenes of oncoming ruin
even as lips graze
its wrists its shoulders
Let today at least be a litany
for softness
that language cannot exhaust
Accident is merely another way of saying
the path was unclear; or it was dark, the moon
was covering its face. A spill of water
on the table tracks a path along grooves
that once lived in the wood— Whatever the impulse,
what leaves arrives at some form of destination.
In our house, we have no hurricane
shelter. In the bathroom, brown tiles
lie next to each other and water
coming through the taps can be
as hot as you want. I am trying to learn
tenderness without fear of being wounded,
without fearing the constant dialogue
of self versus its loneliness.
We were told to keep our heads down.
To forget what we saw on the way
here— Razed lands, furrows seeded
with stumps and fingers.
We were told to close our eyes
when flares descended to melt
the earth under our sandals.
Thousands of wings once beat the air
as they departed into the sky. My heart
was the size of an apple, flesh and skin
dissolving into itself. I clung
to a promise we heard in the time before:
there will be rain again, cool
evenings streaked with ordinary light.
Orchards will leap up from the earth
to embrace a chorus of returning birds.
I stitch the scenes
of the gods' excesses— their
predilection for mortal flesh,
their fascination with trying out
the bodies of beasts; their indiscretions.
I weave the cosmos as a tapestry—
one side a knotted chaos
of carried-over strings,
the other a prized, pearled
sheen. This is nothing
but honesty, though it's also
artistry. The goddess was displeased
because she couldn't tell the truth
apart from the lie. My lies
are magnificent— an archive of evidence,
a triumph of detailing. They will say
I was changed in punishment for my pride;
they will tell you I got only
what was coming. But those are rumors in
a web of trembling— I know I struck
a nerve. Thus they want censorship, book
burning, drastic revision. Scrub away
though they might, I swing by my own tensile thread
in the canopy. My children multiply.
Pages of inked cursive beginning with My darling
or My sweetest and ending with Yours faithfully
until the end of time. Not this I love you
to the moon and back or I love you to Neptune
and back nonsense. Yet I don’t think I’ve
ever seen or heard of a single letter or card
my parents wrote to each other, or if they did so
at all in the history of their courting.
When one was away on a long trip,
I don’t recall the other receiving a postcard
in the mail. What gestures signaled the turn
from friendship to more than friendship,
what form their desire might have taken
in the face of social pressures to be reticent
or discreet? In yellowing pictures: his hand
on her knee as they smile formally; her hip
curving slightly in the direction of the little
flip of her hair, standing against their second-
hand car and the grimy backdrop of a garage.