They haven't stopped running their hands through the grass, springing the doors and windows open, pinning feathers and bird- talons to the rafters like bunting. This too, we've been told, is the language of their love. In the midst of fevered sleep, I hear them discuss the geometry of natural disasters, how we who don't claim immortality can only see the blade edge of a storm as it bears down, and not the remote majesty of its eye whirling in darkness. They haven't stopped beguiling me with the stippled language of light on water, the bronze backs of oxen bowing beneath the unbearable softness of sunsets. I can't always tell whether they've thrown me into the maw of a magnificent desolation, or a quicksand of joy which I fear will drown me before I can churn its currents into a talisman. before I fulfill another impossible task to make me good again, free of debt, in their sight.
Like a Wake
Like a wake, but no one has come to sing karaoke, play pusoy dos or mah jong, drink rum and warm coke. No flowers with funerary smells in the living room, no curling satin ribbons, names inked in permanent marker—they are not the only things that bleed. There are no votives or pictures in frames on a mantel strewn with White Rabbit candies, shiny tangerines, saucers of food offerings. But there are things that, when they go from your life, feel like a death, a mourning. Long road of grieving, no headstone in sight.
Ode to the Serviceberry
Late spring, bordering on summer. Bunnies at twilight come to eat the clover. They have no fear as long as we are behind glass, though the blinds are open. Down the road, people are walking their dogs and children run ahead in that way that leaves their voices behind. We pluck the darkest red berries from the tree in the schoolyard: saskatoon, shadbush, wild-plum, shadblow; otherwise known as serviceberry—herald announcing when shad swam up coastal rivers in spring. And in an older tongue, blow could mean in a state of blossoming, also during that time of year when the soil had softened enough after a hard winter so bodies could be laid in the ground. Traveling preachers held a service under the trees, while birds filled themselves with sugar.
Revolving Door
The child struggling to name big feelings has been heard to cry when he is sad, Make me happy. What makes him sad? A small turn in some expectation, or a more momentous change: moving houses, his school closing for the summer, familiar routines supplanted by new. We all want to feel we've not been abandoned—that the one we love has merely stepped into another room to brush her teeth or take a shower, put the breakfast plates into the dish- washer. How does one learn to forgive happiness like a paper airplane, crisply folded, that lofts but holds only seconds in the air? How is even just a momentary sadness a revolving door? Stuck in the middle, we panic at the thought of glass panels closing in, while everyone else who's passed through goes on with the rest of the day.
Alpha and Omega
Like the English A, alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet; and omega, the last. When I was ten, under a blanket and armed with a flashlight, I devoured those baroque prophecies of apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. They were so cinematic; somehow un-Biblical, dense with special effects and angels blasting trumpets that rained down fire upon the earth, thunder, lightning, earthquakes. A star falls into an abyss, loosing a tribe of locusts with human faces and lions' teeth. Wars and dragons, the old heaven and earth and multitudes scorched by fire or pestilence. What remains at the end is the infinite that always was, and always will be— forbidding vision of a future inscrutable as fate, terrifying as nightmare.
Variation
You were never one to believe that anything marked The End is truly an ending — always, something interrupts a line or repairs the breaks Waterbirds tap the surface of the lake and a lattice of echoes reorganizes the sunlight
Becoming Subatomic
When flying, it's possible to carry the cremated remains of a loved one in a TSA-approved urn that can be x-rayed. Usually it can't be checked in with the rest of your luggage. Some companies advertise that you can send them miniscule amounts of the cremains, which they'll turn into cloudy lockets tinted like amethyst or polished like pearl. You can simply put them into a pouch with the rest of your jewelry—more precious now than any resin or silver statement necklace. Why not just keep snippets of hair like the Victorians did, my husband asks— to the end, wary of rules, penalties, the red tape of forms. Or consider a record company which will press, for a fee, your ashes into a vinyl album. Moving over those places in the grooves, sometimes the needle will jump and make static, crackling sounds: your voice from the beyond, or simply the sound of matter (your own), poured into a sheet of PVC which could take a thousand years or more to decompose.
Seizures
I think it was the teething— molars erupting through the gum that wracked the first two of my daughters with such new pain, they refused food or milk or water. After the seizures, the doctor concurred: likely, dehydration, followed by momentary chemical imbalance. Then the transient, excessive firing of neurons in the brain. Months of fearful testing, every little twitch and blanket-kick in the crib constricting my throat and sealing my tongue in the tomb of my mouth. Decades later, considering the wonder of them from this space, I recall the first tremors and my helplessness; and light pouring in the windows, charged with its own electricity.
Born
When I looked into your eyes after you arrived, I saw galaxies. I saw the eternity of indigo waters through which we were all somehow pulled in our own time; through which we all magnetically traveled, pushed or pushing toward that wound of a door. I saw that timelessness which doesn't keep to one name, its old-young face wrinkled and wizened as if already spackled with a biography of years. We held out our arms to receive you. We trembled from the joy and terror of what we pledged.
Salt
We drop it into every pot of stew, scatter it like a fine mist on a mound of rice as it fries. Its chrism touches our foreheads and grazes our lips, before our mothers run out the church doors to secure our berths in that cloudy kingdom beyond this one. When we cry, its crystals trace a path down our cheeks. Whoever comes to love us will taste that flavor on our shoulders, in the sweat bronzing the hidden clefts, the flame warming the pulse at each wrist. Meat or fish roasted in the fire keeps whole beneath a packed, hard crust. Break it with your fingers to remember rivers, to find what's been made tender.