Unraveling

She thinks of a former teacher who, running into her at a conference, blurts out: I hear your writing is as exquisite as ever, but that your life isn’t. What does one say in the face of such a stupendous welcome? She could have said, Let me start from the beginning; or— no, the beginning before that beginning. Which thread would you like to follow? But then again, it doesn’t really matter, does it? The ball of red yarn might tangle in the bushes, catch on thorns; but always, it leads back to the beast that slumbers in the center. Sometimes there is one beast. Sometimes the one beast is many. It’s grown fat on the gristle of the past and its bedroll of stories: pity, fear, the hurt from a pebble in a shoe. It never spared a thing, lover or child, parent or sibling. In remembering, she remembers too how myth is perhaps the baddest habit, the hardest one to break. Who said she couldn’t lay that tightly wound mess at her feet and simply walk, finding the way back by instinct? Who said she had to pick up the thread, retrace the steps she took before? She wants to leave it, leave it where it is; the signs say it’s time to unhalter her story.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Helmsman.

Oh November,

oh week after the rather disastrous
midterms that didn’t get cancelled
despite the hurricane school closings;
oh agonizing stretch before the next
holiday break, what will I do with you
and with the two who plagiarized
their essays despite submitting them
on SafeAssign? Tonight has been
particularly trying. Only the same
four or five students with any energy
to recite; meanwhile, the rest sit silent,
some sullen, indifferent, slunk low
in their chairs at the end of a long day.
And I’m their last stop, last three-hour,
once-a-week literature requirement put off
for too long, and now it is the final
semester before graduation…
Narrative arc, verisimilitude, conflict
and epiphany are the farthest things
from their minds; but I press on
into the winding corridors of story,
feeling like a guide who’s lost
her troupe somewhere near the cafe
or water fountain or the gift shop
(for sure the gift shop): that too
has been foreshadowed. Once in a rare
while, it almost seems that a word
I’ve uttered has somehow pierced
the veil; as if a small domestic
animal has burrowed close then
suddenly nipped the tender flesh—
and then it is as if a brace of wind
has flung open a window and we
can see the coming snow, sped
by wind, above the trees.

 

In response to small stone (176).

Campo Santo

Todos los Santos, the day of the dead: when everyone whitewashes and scrubs
loved ones’ graves, releasing them a little more each year for passage into heaven.

It’s a picnic, a family or class reunion, the time to pay or extend old debts. No one
finds it grotesque there are karaoke contests across this acreage: rehearsals for heaven.

Chinese families burn joss sticks on their altars. Ancestors in faded sepia
photographs regard offerings of fruit, strips of inked messages lit for heaven.

More than two decades after your death, your image is more than lucid: hovering in
the doorway, in a bathrobe. Time hasn’t assuaged all pain of your departure for heaven.

Here, the days turn chill; leaves deepen from green to gold and scarlet.
Frosted breath lofts up like incense smoke, as if uncaged, or leavened.

 

In response to Morning Porch and small stone (175).

Life Skills

This must have been the way the world was made: gleaming with wings, hillsides burnished before their dazzle dimmed. When dunes spat back their sand, we wandered through the vegetation in a daze, frightened by broken-off quills and outsized petioles, assaulted by a flotsam of smells, afraid to touch or taste or gather… What wind wrenched away, we’d have to carve back, painfully, by hand. The schools, the corner fast food places, the notaries’ and doctors’ offices, the grocery stores whose shelves were licked by giant tongues of water— What was it about disorder that brought us to our knees? Gradually we remembered what could be done with mud; which crystals broken off from rocks along the beach might pass for salt. It took a while before we sighted birds. The first bright sun came through thick drapes of cloud that looked like women’s breasts. The shore resembled none that we had ever seen before. Someone began to write an almanac of our days— New kinds of growth no longer matched with our old reckoning of time. Someone took pains to straighten a row of stones above the water line.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Cities of Gold

In legends I know, the heavens are many-
layered. Cloud rats skitter there,

and flying squirrels. An orange tree
felled at the beginning of time

branched into veins leafed with copper
and gold ore where it hit the ground.

To this day, miners search for its
bright fruit by tunneling into the dark

on their bellies: no safety harnesses,
sometimes no headlamps. Only a second

sense that ticks through the loam
toward El Dorado, storied city

whose blueprint cannot be ascertained.
Among these stones, warriors once stalked

enemies, returning to their villages
with trophies of heads dangling from

their hands. They dunked and washed these
in the river, then lopped off and boiled

the jaws down to bone— A brass gong
adorned with this polished handle vibrated

with such unearthly power: even the grass
blades shivered as if lacerated by wind.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Medusa, Boddhisatva.

In the Margins

So tempting, still, to want to arch desire in the direction
of what doesn’t merely live— by grace— on the season’s margins.

Like crows and common starlings, bronzed gloss of feathers flashing
where they forage in the dirt, or on the sidewalk’s margins—

Tap into the popular vein, says a friend: write blood, gore, sex, vampires;
more sex, then zombies. You’ll sell like hotcakes from the margins.

And pedigree? Unfortunately I’m still not pure enough, nor hybrid enough:
my accidents of birth, of history; my gender, color, keep me in the margins.

Prove more, prove higher, prove over and over— And while you’re at it,
take care you don’t show up another, perched higher above your margin.

How long have such races been run? Here’s a short list of prize deferments:
Atalanta’s golden apples, Tantalus’ hunger rising and ebbing into the margins.

Suckled in the wilderness, that amazon learned to hunt and fight with the bears.
And that cannibal, child-killer, dog-stealer? What other notes are in the margins?

Who funded those commercials? If you had stolen nectar and ambrosia off the table
of the gods, wouldn’t you be blacklisted, your name defiled in the margins?

And yes, I might push that rock from sandy bottom up to the crest of the hill: but
my loyalty belongs to that frisson no one sees, that fire I tend within the margins.

 

In response to small stone (173).

Thence

Venturing out afterwards,
we count the bricks torn up
in the last hurricane, note

the welter of leaves stripped
from branches; see, as if for the first
time, stark form— Few layers now

obscure the view, so surface
and foreground more closely match
the underneath. All the gaudy

accessories— frills of russet leaf,
curled copper, tongues of topaz yellow—
recede into silt and verdigris

at the edges. And the water
that with the tidal surge rose
through narrow alleys by corner

restaurants, came up the steps
of a public library built in 1904
(foreclosed a few years ago by the Old

Point National Bank). It barely grazed
the sidewalks on our own street,
though merely a block away

the neighbors had two feet of water
in their garages. And no, we can’t
predict which of these buildings

will sink into the sea (brick or aluminum
siding, stucco, vinyl, fiber cement); which
ones will weather the onslaughts of another

century. Soon after inventories of its losses,
the city and its neighborhoods rumble slowly
back to life. The gulls return—

not that they ever left—
and like us, pick desultorily
through oddments, through debris.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Kabayan

They climbed to the promontory
and took photographs of memorials,
brushing the dirt aside to read
the letters that told of who
had been there before. She wondered
if the black specks she sighted
above the ridge were vultures; if,
after all this time, such birds
might still take an interest
in cured and leathered bodies,
mummified and resting in their caves.
In the village, the rest house
had no heat. For bathing,
there were metal drums filled
with chilled spring water. It was
the last day of the year—
Bonfires flickered. Frost trails
formed at the ends of sentences.
They were unaware of their own
restlessness, soon to be eclipsed
by the years. Above terraces
lined by hand with stone
upon stone, the occasional burst
of a firecracker. Mostly, the wind.
Or the muffled sound of a gong.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

October

That calm: before?
after?— The storm.

The pause
that brackets

the feathered cry
at dawn— The rooster

trills Deny, deny
And still the waters

rush across the pier.
The turnstile

at the station twirls
in place. A wall

is shorn away to show
the flimsy hive.

The branch comes down
upon the roof.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.