Air wasn’t always as light as it is nowadays. When I was a kid, standing upright took real effort, & walking, we felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. The air was a physical presence & our lungs were made of sturdy leather. We had to work for every breath — not like you kids today who can buy cheap bottled air at any gas station. Bones were so dense & muscles so hard from the constant struggle, it was impossible to kill anyone unless you used a lead bullet or sharpened a blade for hours. The sky reached all the way to the ground if there weren’t any trees or buildings nearby to prop it up. We took all our holidays by the shore & dove into the water to escape the sky’s tyranny, savoring as long as we could the illusion of lightness.
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.
Savasana
Find the rest in any pose,
the teacher said: as circling birds
eventually come to roost,
as the water’s thrashing
quiets after it, too,
has had its fill.
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.
Medusa, Bodhisattva
The Medusa of legend
actually started out as
a bodhisattva-in-training.
Like Avalokiteśvara
with eleven faces,
she aspired to sprout
a forest of little headlets
atop her head, so as never
to fail to meet a believer’s
imploring gaze.
But she felt compassion
for the stone-workers,
& worried how men
would render her
in relief carvings on cave walls
or chisel her in the round
from soft marble.
She was stirred by the hiss
of insense sticks, the censer
a-bristle: it sounded
like bliss, that extinction.
If the goal was to end
the cycle of rebirth,
she reasoned, why not
reincarnate as something
utterly immune to desire?
Let the others say
they’d forestall nirvana
until every blade of grass
attained liberation.
Medusa vowed not
to leave a stone
unturned.
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.
The Origin of the Ear
Once upon a time, the ear was a flower that bloomed every day & by night bore dream-fruit. Helix & antihelix fused & swelled like the fat lip of an orchid. Deep in the ovule, a complex apparatus of drum & cocclea translated sounds into fertile seeds. Words had wings, & notes would fly from a saxophone like golden bees.
What happened? Why are we stuck now with these passive receptacles, this garbage in & garbage out? I blame the first tongue that found a way to get around not being forked. Once language knew how to feed on the ready sugar of lies, who needed nectar? Ears are for hearing, we said. Which is why nobody listens anymore except for the truly deaf.