Dream Songs

Water

In a green world where nothing changes but the light,
Thumbelina and her naked Prince,
tangles of reeds matting their wild hair,
trace each other’s limbs in sunshine
with garden constellations, in moonlight
with glowing paper lanterns,
a tableau upon a leaf floating in the current,
sweetness of summer past dreaming.
Then the sky opens, a tumult of waterfall appears;
the fragile raft founders unsurprised, in shallows,
a timeless stage piece shining still, a sacred present,
constant and luminous even in its drowning.

Rock

No wish nor will can force the years to swell
until you grow into this crown,
no stories, no bellying up, no bed time.
We build antipathies, rock on bitter rock:
who asks and who keeps silence,
who heaps up expectation upon hours and days lost
of love too short, too spotty, too querulous,
too worked.
In a circle of stones we don’t intend to gather,
cannot stop gathering, Pierrot and Judy
– the punch line long delivered –
sit apart among the empty chairs.

Rain

This wreckage is a dream, too, you know:
the idea that we will awaken, find footing
in the downpour, or clarity, reason,
or even that there is a wavering, lineal truth,
a tiny crown to scoop out, gleaming, from the tranquil muck.
The night I leaned into your lap and felt your stiffening
against the back of my neck is now
accounting in the ether.  Still –
in bed alone, dreaming of rain, I know suddenly this present stasis
is a shadow of our green masque
and not much different from it,
no less nor more a story to tell myself.

Ravine #3

Homespun trickster, he came to us hunted, humbled, a robber robbed,
determined, in the beginning, to acquit.  He rolled the well-stone
from the water, called me his little ewe, teased me like a brother,
then wept with me when I cried.  “A few days,” he said
of seven bilked years – my bride price – then gave me to my sister
to wife in earnest, in bitterness, her mete.

In time, he pocketed the household gods and paired off with the servants,
substitutes, to satisfy me.  He knew the dreams of that country.
He knew my worth, I, a callow girl and a dead woman.  I bathed
my thighs in water,  uncovering with strange exactness
how fertile is betrayal, how lie begets lie, how quickly
he would close my mouth with a pile of rocks.

Ravine #2 Reprinted from The Camel Saloon, June 2014

You, my veiled rivals, show up on camel back
just before the time of candle lighting,
before the time of fire.
Your gift of speckled sheep and your flocks of children
straggle behind with their slave maid.
She is not thinking about you.
I offer well water and bread, the scent of leaven rising
from the oven to the sky,
and honey, bury my face in your throats, weep
for blood and for bone,
for flesh I remember, for the mandrake
you carry.  Its gaping mouth is my womb’s opening
after too many hollow years, a time deeper than dreaming.
Now I lie down with you – my seconds and thirds, together in sorrow –
break my heart thrice upon the hard edge of love.
He shades his eyes with his prayer shawl,
rocking upon his heels and chanting
to his ruthless god.
They are in this together
Our shared pillow is stone.
I take your babes upon my knee and name them.

Reprinted from Eyedrum Periodically, July 2013

I am at Manuel’s –
there are plank tables so it must be Manuel’s –
and Stan is here –
we are bundled in knit caps and scarves and mittens –
our breath mingles white in the dank, beery air,
and all I can talk of is Coca-cola –
that thick blue glass,
that luscious frozen sweat
melting in rivulets when it meets fingertips.
I revolve my tongue on it,
hum to it, tickle it with specifics,
shake it up and lick the fizz as it bubbles over the lip.
He says, “You know these bottles may not be enough.”
His arms are laden with them. They look like lilies.
Okay, do something about it: beat back death.
Scrape of wool plaid and the scent of winter,
deckle caps, shock of brown cold, cascade of sweetness –
trembling in the throat, swelling heartbeat, spreading flush,
flecks of ice.

with Unisa Asokan

Reprinted in Eyedrum Periodically, July 2014

A red box of matches,
a ten pound stick of butter,
a 20 pound sac of sugar, the river.
The body covered in yellow cloth, embroidered with a gold pattern.

Down to the river we carry you,
by holy Ganges’ ghastly rush.  Bathers in sun
flame, at sunrise, rub their skins with ash,
press hands to foreheads dotted
with bright pigments, bend into water –
no waiting for a reason to let go.

Flies. More flies.
The family touches the skin of the dead for the last time.

Here, to the ghats, we bear you on our shoulders –
bier tented in swaths of red,
tented in fire, hands pressed to your navel.
When we tilt you into the water, flame
rises from your open mouth like prayer – press
of current, chimera – rush of nothing you need.

The fire negotiates an exchange of light, overnight.
A crew of the cremation caste sifts through the ashes and remains.
Fingers find a wallet chain, a septum ring, a flask of whiskey,
an anchor made of copper.

Holy city, where temples shoulder one another
under an ashy sky and bodies drift in the flood,
your mourners, idle now, lower hands,
stand and brush clay dust from trousers,
opening mouths to paper cones of puffed rice.
Holy water, holy river, carry me.  Let me go.

golden orb

dream catcher, yellow bloom,
coral legs so straight and horned they tempt
teeth, spits this sparkling mourning crown
for us to blunder into, first word already torn,
already provisional, a thread
we wipe our mouths on: no wonder
she eats silk, vanishes around the corner
of the house like fourth of July,
like Christmas.

Body Talk

Parse directly
with moon to light us,
this story our bodies construct.
Squabble
wordlessly.

In the language of muscle
and skin and scent,
sound is sweat,
gender is only
consequence.

Toss your spangled hat to the floor.
My hand in yours is a long letter,
a chronicle.  I teach with silence,
lingua viscera,
poem.

Iridotymous

Born suspect.  Born exiled
on Adam’s street.  My name.
Marker of my mother and her mother,
her father before, his forty-acre tract
of Carolina outland – invisible –
poverty of black on black.  Word for it
litany of my childhood,
first word I remember, first word
meant for me, my skin
the story, Everyman’s story,
speck upon
seeing
who I am not.

The Shaman

He has walked through the classroom door one thousand times.
You replay the details: pouch of dung, horn bowl, ashes,
sun-bleached hair woven with feathers and bones,
dried animal blood, healing shells.
His mask is two wounds: blindness and sight.
The force of an archetype
can knock us to the ground, shatter us.
He looks just like Jesus.
That shattering.

Great un-doings, grand falls, will not piece together, say why.
Spirits visit us.  There is water.  Man walks into a room.
He is not you, not yours.  His are not your wounds.
Keep him close, without desire or need  –
but tell the truth about it – you
pursued him.  You sent his staff arching over the ravine.
You won’t ditch him, even though he is not, nor can be,
the lover you thought
you had saved.

Albrecht Speaks

Tragedy is a woman who reads portents, watches for rains
that never come.  One evening during the Wanderjahre
as we stand drinking in a tavern,
I show her my drawings, trials in wood and in bronze,
scraps of paper lined up on a bench.
She finishes stories in the spaces
between them, says, as her face dents into planes,
as she bends low over the crumbs under the table,
as if she might like to scoop them up,
“When you are here, you are so much here,
and when gone, all gone.”

I take her by the arm and lead her with me
into the dusk of the square, point to cloud towers edged in rose,
church spires, my own feet in their felt boots – all species of miracle,
all ways of knowing how pain sharpens love –
recall for her my underworlds, rocks sprouting from lichen,
a triptych with its face of Jesus, my face,
dancers on riverbanks, men and women marketing in haggles,
scribes overturning words and finding bricks,
husbands at twilight counting sacks of wool into coin,
and children reckoning reeds or hacking at one another with stars,
crying, “Ha. You’re dead.”

Spoiled son, haunted soldier, oaf queen,
a hare cowers where I follow it into the sedge,
its terror, my terror,
its little life, my life, and this woman tonight, geometries,
ovals and squares of particulars, trace of foam on her cheek.
The waters of heaven and earth are all the same waters, I tell her
silently.  Time is all time.
“But I am alone,” she says.

http://magazine-record.blogspot.com/2014/06/body-talk-parse-directly-with-moon-to.html

Going Public

An odd, static exposure in asphalt fog and weird
chaotic sunlight, the aftershock of violence –
our wrench from bed into the publicity of Radio Shack –
its shortwave parking and day-splintered windows,
our befuddled circuit for the high definite,
for the unscramble
in the cords and antenna aisle –
we channel nouns, send skin signals, fix on pelvic
clarity – shattering dipole strangeness,
thick band, lingering drag, tight at the gonads
and chest, semen pulse for startling reception.
Turn away and toward –
it’s in the blood –
this charged and fluent harmony, electric.

Molting

See. There goes another one.
In this early fall of feathers
I have found seven, one
for every day, blue steel sheen
calling from the pavement or gray spin,
filamented, rotating before my feet
like a maple key, a promise of return. He says
molting is going on in my tree and I think about energy
persevering, separate, unconscious,
physics and meaning wound into one, every gain
a little loss, differences between us
negligible, all time happening all the time,
the two of us and the bird we know exists
from feathery evidence alone,
growing up together.