ALL RESPONSES |
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You're a character in a novel Victor Hugo never wrote,
a sparrow with broken wings who falls out of the nest
and flies much higher than eagles could ever dream of,
past barriers of body, death and time to grasp the jewel
within the angry, hard layers of skin and woven truth.
You are me and so many others as well, who fight
through lives of violent confusion, fight towards life
instead of walking, breathing death, instead of a world
created by laughing gods, laughing at the immutable,
at how easy it is to construct cathedrals in every soul.
We cry our signatures in blood on plain brown paper
in payment for indulgences we’re programmed to seek,
trapped in silent comfort, wrapped in colorful voices
who preach love and lust and eternal psychotherapy
and cast lots for the remains from the sacred inquisition. |
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Bent of back and head scrape down
The pounds so few though their soon sound rages
With clenched fists and perfect arms
Another bent back when it ages
From rounded face to knob of knee
The child wails, free of the womb
Rinse, repeat—more knees to scab on street
More, “Why?” “Because.” to meet the aged
More questions for which there are no answers. |
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On tambur drums snows are falling
early morning yawn - the howl of words
feed your legs - running into December
into the curve of the earth
plung heart - push feet into its toil
agony grasp - pains my melody
foots fast and hope - its soon over
into the ice room sheets and smother - blue moths in another
being born into the crything mouth of earth.
On this shortest night, a millkyway to smolder
we threw you up new - in tow gathered up, an origin.
In lieu of dreading getting old, gather up again,
twigs and strings to sail into
the black of a host I was made from
other things - I've already seen.
Lust is below my meaning in this place;
leading me through some rottening - leading me with money
returned and surprised awake - still to refuse!
the dawn,
recognize this is all i own- breath, your kites string
tie me to that! Brown of the Carmelites, small hills
first traversed curious yawe |
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I speak of tiny lives
given to the light; they flow
like shallow streams,
they keep the light close,
inside, just as the light glints
on night rivers, just as the sun
flows through close trees; I speak
of lives given to the light
I speak of brief lives, all our lives,
draping from women in blood
and blood lines and tiny feet;
I speak of brief lives draping
and men weeping and women
weeping and tiny inside lives draping
No one yet mistrusts these lives;
they are quiet and dark and foreign
and sad; they move uncertainly—
faint as stars at dawn—
like the souls of morning candles,
these tiny souls move uncertainly
toward light; I speak of lives
given to the light; I speak
of lives wanting the light |
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You claim I’ll belong to you forever but
remember I came through a vacuous womb
by myself, I swam through a tortuous channel
without you. If I brushed aside you once in life
and shared a certain ancestry, it may have meant
nothing at all.
Your argument for this untenable bond is that
we shared that same womb once and flowed
through the same dark waters. The sage says, however,
you can’t step in the same river twice, and that
makes us no more connected than me and Mother Theresa.
Here’s a summation of what I think of relations:
Once, a friend of mine said something stupid while
at his brother’s funeral. He was fourteen years old and
a little bewildered. “Can I have his stereo?” he asked,
and they still hold that comment against him.
Couple of decades passed – there was Vietnam, 911,
several presidents, tsunamis and such and still some
resent him, or the he they think is him.
What I’d like to tell them if only they’d get it is
he buys certain music no one else ever heard of
because he heard that's what his brother liked,
proving much more about love than a surname ever could.
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Baby Faces
Baby faces only show surprise
At first, surprise or despair. Smiling comes later,
When she finds herself delightfully alive
In a funny world of rough, tickling Daddies,
Mummies who sing. Later she will learn,
In strict order, anger, fear, disgust,
Pleading, and last of all, the raised,
Conspiratorial look of irony, when she knows
What's what.
Why above all else do we love
A baby's sleeping face, where only flickers
Of smile appear, brief startles, shadows of worry,
Distant sucking movements, like the play
Of cloud-lightning out to sea, seen but not heard,
Inkling of trouble in another country? |
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Do you look at or
hold him, shocked, in your warm arms?
Your cold baby boy. |
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Once is never enough, my motto, my downfall.
I used to watch him at his easel, chalk in hand,
working out a picture of the human body.
How did he know every curve?
How did he know every fold?
These details were holy secrets.
And then he noticed me, and my folds. And I understood.
But not completely.
He did have the courtesy to give me wine and to wait for my sleep.
I felt him undress me. I thought it was a dream. I smiled.
I watched him caress my belly and murmur a prayer.
I relaxed into his touch.
Our eyes locked as his hand moved towards my breasts.
He kissed me and I felt a knife glide across my neck.
My sleeping baby girl, a Holy Secret.
I understood and he looked away. |
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It doesn't matter if the head is tucked
or not because in the end it's all about
finding that spot, the comfort of curling,
the ability to contort the spine, the strength
to push yourself out of difficult situations when
all walls seem to fold in on you and keep you quiet
for just twenty-four hours longer than we can stand. |
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Your preborn gills are,
technically speaking,
signs of the undead.
So is the oxygen in my veins and
my oxygen in yours
and I
she
we
could have had you dead dead
Mr. undead
with one bouquet of flowers.
Darwin Darwin
Nietzche Freud
Lyrics little love.
I wish I could have made you better
and I hope you never have to write
Ariel
Daddy Daddy!
But maybe that's too paternalistic
Maybe I'm rooting for the wrong side after all
Bartender, I need another drink
or twenty
for the next--what--eighteen years?
I used to draw you
and I now know
now
you're breathing from her page
with gills. |
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| This was how the new order began: An old man shriveling, weak and hunched and eversmaller. Everything shrank but his stomach, which formed a hard, pulsing ball. Cancer, the doctors said; it wouldn’t be long now. In his final days he lay in an induced coma, his eyes staring at clouds in the window, a murmur on his lips like an incantation for forgiveness, or perhaps a last curse on the world; none could tell. Then he passed. But the belly began to move though his neck was pulseless, and his dead grey skin split away, and to the wonder of the assembled doctors and grandchildren, a baby emerged from the husk of a corpse, pink and squalling and healthy, and wailed and swung his arms in the air. All but the youngest grandchild were afraid of the baby, but this youngest one walked forward, taking a stack of towels from the closet. He wiped the child dry, wrapped up the baby, and realized it was hungry. It was a boy, with the same features as the old man who had died and now, Phoenix-like, was returned to them. What do we do now? Said the old man’s only surviving child. The doctor didn’t know, but the youngest grandchild did. Get a birth certificate, he said. And prepare yourself. This won't be the last one born like this. |
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A single-bed;
overhead,
three wooden
beams focus
in a light pool
projected by
the corner
intersection
lamp light
through an open
shadeless window:
a congregation
of possibilities
The counterpoint:
memories clinging
where they must
have been
Lydia Small once
lived here; almost
like a fetus; her
body curled
in broken time
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The time has come
for the push to the surface,
of what I can hardly imagine.
I simply unravel my dew-coated
limbs at the force of some
unseen direction.
Falling quickly behind me
are the sounds and the pattern
of a solitary heartbeat
to which I have listened, the
organization of one beating muscle
nestled over my head.
As the surface nears other
sounds approach me, voices and
lights and hands that grab me
I strain to remember the sounds
that left me, the finely tuned dripping
of fluids and air.
No perception no thought no taxing
examination lives in that place
without sunlight or hours
but I long to get back to that sound
I remember, that sweet pounding chamber
with repeating rhythms
I try to recapture sensations I had there,
I grab at memories of those early
surroundings,
not feeling I was lonesome
not knowing I was listening
not thinking or creating –
but it’s so faint now, its drowned by sorrows
and too many voices and pressing arrangements,
still I try to listen the way I listened
when that was my only assignment
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Big, round empty circle mind,
a clean slate,
inside a small round womb of warm fluid
pushes out onto the circumference
of a giant solid ball.
As the eyes open, the scribe
writes line after line of constructs
that give this new world density.
The original circle filled
with concrete.
Levity is lost,
gravity binds, an intangible force
from the formed mass.
Weightlessness stripped away
in the process of becoming
(there is only being),
violent tectonic collisions
as cranial plates harden,
brimming with definitions and data,
a sea of information,
a mess to wade through to find
what was lost.
The yearning turns into a search.
Memories, dependencies, catalogs of comprehension,
dialog, longing for self satisfaction,
all rendered obsolete.
This is where the awakening begins,
where the true birth happens.
The mental circle grows too full
and wants nothing more than
to emerge into only existence,
to find once again the peace of mind
of an empty circle. |
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Moving, if only just
across town,
can be a little
like being born.
A creature folded
up in certain ways
for a certain time
must unlearn quickly
with minimum squalling,
new ways for a new time.
She dreams her refrigerator
stolen in broad daylight,
no food but a huge onion
mispacked with her books.
Balance that horror
with the thrill of standing
stocking-footed on the
gravity furnace iron grate
there on the floor between kitchen
and living room,
abating November morning's chill.
Balace that horror
with the late night contentment
of curling up
in the old way
while hearing the owl
in the overhanging oak ask
'who cooks for you?'
Each day a birth. |
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My bed I made today; undress this coldness
which came in clinging to my breath. Unless
you wish to hold down sleep with boldness,
just leave as steam, as sins, confess
the air.
Just leave just leave, you stagnant chill
out sheets indeed as winter will--
this coat of snow which hides its freezing,
hollow-thunder under white (so pleasing),
take off! take off your gelid clothes!
in layers.
The lightning flashes, warmly moans
my sweat collects...the distance grows...
for now I fall asleep alone
without this you! this cold ensnaring!
so true! so stored, such eyes! Them. Staring.
While lying, i like to feel in
my bed a touch which has not been
my own rare rawness.
even cold will do
i guess. |
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That strange knee-gripping fetal,
petal position in the womb,
the hiatus between life and death,
more like the meat in a walnut
than a future daughter.
The crouch, the whole reach
of life from beginning
egg to crouched old.
Available for dropping
in every day life.
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Her face flies apart
when you look, scatters
like starlings from a tree
then reassembles new.
That’s how I see her when
Trinity College Library
displays a model made by
a Renaissance doctor—
a pregnant woman
belly cut away showing
the child inside her
with a man’s face—
set between the rows of marble busts
(Newton & Plato & Aristotle &
Hamilton & Demosthenes & Locke.)
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Two years ago, Jesus found me
down the hospital corridor; a nurse
had brought him over and they both
sat with me for almost half the night,
talking about my shaking hands
“All you need to do is ask”
I wouldn’t listen; I was thinking
about father’s struggles with
Alzheimer’s and leaking aneurism
“Did he make it?”
“No. They seldom do” |
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We are such small, mad beings
our veins swollen and sock-eye red
memories too long, too short are born
in the underground storehouse
and begin to devour us.
The old, knotted, gnarled will say
we are such small, mad things, no less
twisted into a hump backed tango
no less implanted in this alizarin soil.
Perhaps our batteries are dead
our smoke alarms can’t complain
so we become small mad plants
where rain in the desert doesn’t matter
any more than snow piling up in Duluth.
The gulls are hysterical, shorebirds
drown in oil, children so hungry
because we are so small, so mad.
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About to be reborn
New world
Professional comfort
and shelter
the beat of the system
gone
for good
no possibility of return
Cold
count the ways
Altricial support
notwithstanding
the sense is precocial
kicked out of the nest
Like death
birth inevitable
What of the new child?
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clothed in your temperate womb
the lines of my body became truer
in the viscous waters of you
mother moonlight, did you wrench beneath
cold sweat; the secret of a boy wound tightly
as a worm in loosening soil? |
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I have lost myself. Womb,
untouched. Fetus, for the
wolves. Here, in corporate a
personality, in
the career that chases mone
the dream is lost and
I am gone.
The hand that does not write,
the mouth that does not perk
to form a question. A child,
without the years,
without the knowledge of God and
all of his misdoings.
I have lost myself. In the kitchen,
I form your croissants with my left hand,
my right, I am
saving for better things. |
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Merry wants whipped cream to top her pumpkin pie,
and also to be a princess. Instead of buying Cool Whip
we poor thick cream into a stainless steel bowl, take
turns whisking it. |
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