29 July 2014

Calling

My grandmother’s God was repetition

and abundance.

We could mark time by the retelling of stories: 

The one where hurricane winds bent

Gulf Coast palms so they kissed the beach.

The time my father

planned to join the circus and used my aunt

for knife-throwing practice—

Thump...giggle...thump...giggle, it went,   

and then, Praise the Lord he had bad aim.

And the one less often told

because it cut a cold chasm
through the sweet evening air--
the one about carnage and election:

four teenage bodies broken

on gravel, in ditch, 

two hours before morning.

She was the survivor.

So she set to 30 years of ceaseless praise for the gracious earth and its fickle God, filling three deep freezers and five pantries with the gifts of the garden, enough pickles and soups and preserves to feed the children of the living and the dead for a generation.

Lying in the bed of unrestrainable mint,
I would tell my brother my vision:

There is a river running under this house.

I know you can’t hear it,

but I can.

No river I had ever seen,

not like the lazy, silty Chattahoochee,

but a diamond-clear liquid highway

brimming with salmon,

lusty and muscular with intent.

In the first flashes of fireflies at twilight,

I could feel it rush

under the sweet gum tree,

whispering deliverance.

She worried about me.  

Too many cryptic paper scraps,

too many boys tapping at the screen door,

my heart given away
too easily to the musty encyclopedias

bought the year I was born—

meant to be a decorative flourish
in an otherwise bookless realm.

I’m a poet, I would say to her,

intending to make light.

Honestly, how much trouble

can I get into? 

15 May 2014

Every Other Weekend

I expect to her it felt like failure,

eight steps down to the basement,

fifty precious dollars less a month

than the first floor with a balcony rail

and a partially obstructed view to the future.

This is why they call it garden level,

I always thought,

brushing by her irrepressible hanging plants,

craving the cool surrender of descent

over the sweat and elbows of climb.

I remember myself reflected infinitely

in the six paneled mirror

around the clawfoot tub,

three steps up on carpet, with stage lighting—

an extravagant queen’s welcome

for not yet breasts and misdirected teeth.

The 2am freight train

rattled hollow doors and the electric stove,

barely moved the wood block picture frame

wedged between the Big Book

and a Christmas cactus.

She worried I could not sleep through it.

I tried not to.
The predictable, dream-riddled earthquake
was assurance,
that the world can shake mightily

and not crumble.

9 May 2014

Capacity

Curious how this first talk over tea, 
strangers becoming acquaintances,

makes me think
of inchworms. 

Especially that spring

when they rained down

from the trees in the backyard

by the hundreds.

The first few that appeared

on the windshield

inspired my daughter to action

building private homes out of quahog shells

with leaf beds and leaf dinners

and little flowerheads

for atmosphere.

On the second day,

construction couldn’t keep pace,

Materials were in short supply, 

and the furnishings and decor suffered. 

Some of our heaven sent friends
had to bunk up.

By day three,

the car as iridescent green

as it was its native blue,

she was inconsolable.

Every departure down the driveway

was a genocide.

Now you are here telling stories

of couch surfing, 

held by the kindness of strangers.

Something an inchworm would do—

base jumper, intrepid adventurer—

if only it didn’t take a lifetime

to cross those fifteen cement blocks

marking off the patio. 

On a given day, you arrive,
vibrant and sincere,

but all the beds are already taken.

They say construction is underway,

but God knows

it will be generations of inchworms
to see it done.

8 May 2014

The Proposition

Something about the way you ask—

“How can I see you again?”—

makes me want to put on different robes.

Because nothing fits, anything can be worn

for a while.

And I’ll let you, of course, see me—

because earnest desire pleases me,

and because I am unsure if we are here at all

outside of being noticed.

But the how is just the question, isn’t it?

I think maybe I’ll show up as someone simple
this time.

Just imagine—

No old, weeping wounds still being nursed.

No visions of treacherous strangers

taking my bed as their own.

No grand work to accomplish. 

Just some stories about picking blueberries

on hot hills in distant summers,

amusing misunderstandings and fender benders,

and a European backpacking trip
that changed my life when I was 22. 

And now a well-worn reading nook in my apartment

that catches some sunlight,

an impish resistance to gossip,

enough work to buy tangerines and freesia

every week at the market where we meet,

and soundless pictures of making love in new places

in the afternoon, no urgency.

I could try it on.

Months could go by before

what’s been written and said
finds its way to you.

26 February 2014: Marin County

Arrangement

The purple anemones from the Sunday market

are glorious all week long. 

But there is an instant, 

sometime on Wednesday, 

when they pass from blooming beauty

into dying beauty. 

I always seem to miss it. 

It must happen when I'm washing the dishes, 

or singing the children's bedtime anthology, 

or sorting the books into usable order--
sometimes remembering to try to be mindful, 

to defer to the teachings. 

Or maybe it was spoken this way into the primordial wind: 

how it was to be,
this ministry of cut flowers. 

That we should see not the apex of their decline
or their resistant throes, 

but only the exuberant stretching to sunlight, 

the praise for fresh water--

and then, ineffably, the graceful surrender

of bowing leaves and drifting petals, 

the easy disintegration of severed stems
into that fecund stew, 

breathing out low tide and high farmland

at once. 

16 January 2014: East Oakland

1 Kings 19

The cave was not unlike a home.

She could straighten the hand towels

and dust the candlesticks

there just as well as anywhere.

The constant crumbling

was a nuisance, of course,

and it was impossible

to keep the threshold swept clear
of the outside trying to make its way in.

When the wind came,

it made a circuit clear across the dinner table,

setting flowers and crystal to flight.

But God was not in the wind.

There was the night

when the whole scene

shook and swayed,

waking her from shallow sleep,

and the lights flashed on and off.

Two hours of tremors,

then every photo down from the walls,

not just shattered glass

but frames snapped and paper ripped to pieces,

with the rage intent

on eviscerating morning.  

But God was not in the earthquake.

She found she could be

in a place that her hands called home

while her heart was a thousand miles away,

alone on an island in a lake of fire. 

She knew she should not set camp there,

as her birthright called out

from the not so distant shore.

But night fell, as it always does,  

with the flames no less enthusiastic.

So she slept again,

like the caged lioness sleeps,

hearing whispers of the hunt in her dreams. 

But God was not in the fire.

In the end,

there was the silence that stood calmly

on her doorstep

for three full days

before it asked:

“What are you doing here?”

No words for an answer.

Only hands,

heart,
feet.