21 May 2015

bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
"It was a kind of transformation. I never thought about birds." 

You should set the crow to work
as soon as you can.
For the pennies you spend on peanuts,
you create in her a grinding hunger--
for home, for mother, for lover.
It will serve you well.

She will unhaunt your days,
gather up the frayed edges of your life,
bind them with remnant thread.
You can trust her
not to store up treasures.
There is no marketplace
for what we have forgotten
to remember.

Her gathering is all
the erotic joy of the find,
solitary flight and impossible vision
turned to tenderness and submission.

She relishes your carelessness;
it is your courtship.

      Take a moment to hear that.

She needs you to unclench.
How else could you love
her blue-black anonymity
and her plaintive common caw,
if you couldn't call her curator,
redeemer?

19 May 2015

All of your meaning, all of your integrity or looks

—it must be put into words. 

And the words come without clothing. 

~Howard Thurman

I will admit to fearing death,
though not the dark passage.
It’s all the indelible living,
marks of this awkward lumbering
through embodiment,
what I won't have time to redeem

or erase.

The one nearest my heart
archives compulsively—
tastes and words and treasures—
lest he be forgotten.
I disintegrate compulsively,
lest I be remembered.

But the body can’t live and be silent both.
It speaks all it does not intend,
leaves residue and imprint,
like the shimmering ghost of the snail’s path,
like the improbable weight of a chest full of moths
pressing down four feet—
perfect circles, perfect square,
perfect uselessness.

Inevitably, what will be left of me,
after all the ventured obscurity:
tax returns,
sloughed skin,
uneaten greens,
love, intended.

20 April 2015, Alcatraz

Echo

It seems as likely
that what Narcissus came to,
wandering the overgrowth without destination,
was that waiting well of sadness
in his own heart,
the prison of remembering.
It was the sinking, not the surface,
that lured him in.
And he couldn't help but stare
into the eyes of someone so near and unfamiliar,
into the dark pond spawning ample life
of brief tenure.
Flowering on the muddy banks of loss
is just the way of tenacious things.

Though you can't help but wish he had known 

her ruinous beauty, 

tremor of breath,
depth calling to depth.

16 April 2015, Spanish Bay

Spanish Bay 

I went out alone in rising light
to the place they say the explorer mistook
for Monterey.
This ghostly crescent of sand
not asking for a name.
That's always the way, it seems.
Set sights on one place, find another,
then reckon,
or fail to.

With my back to the four story facade,
no high sun casting shadow,
it is still a virgin sea
rousing virgin shore,
elements undiscovered
except to each other, endlessly.

Beneath the scene,
the anxious dunes are losing ground.
But now, in windless dawn
and still dreaming surf,
they sprawl ancient and valiant,
untroubled.

In the catholic view,
only I am waiting to be found.

3 April 2015

Book of Hours

The retrospective of my life's loves
is likely to reveal:
a coarse forgotten tug from virginity,
the still smoldering mass
of locomotive steel from the head on,
a raging river of near misses,
and now you, like Norwegian winter,
full dark waiting
before the noon hour.

Speaking of extreme north,
there is also, you know,
the distress of summer,
the unrelenting sun
seizing vigils and vespers,
the blinding dominion of all lauds.

The greater part of our mystery
and disassembling,
that delicious release
of bone from muscle and mind from matter,
crammed into two hours
of desperate dark.

I can't say I'd rather.

16 February 2015

10

When you stumble from bed this morning--
that way you do
with the night's dream journeys
stirring at your heels,
an improbable teaching on your tongue,
twigs and sand and wizardry
tangled in your hair--
you will claim a decade.

While I wait,
my prayers for you still
come so swift and furious
that they trip over each other,
and I am forced to concede
again
that I have no claim over your destiny,
not even a petitionary one.

The day you were born,
sibling to three whose lifetimes
began and ended in the womb,
your heart
(still today so tender it cannot bear suspense)
recoiled from the drama of delivery.

You became in that moment
and remain
not my reward for tortured patience,
but an ethereal thing,
spirit in boy form,
arriving at its own pleasure.

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?