Poetry
Something called a GiveBox appeared
this fall on Falckensteinstrasse, and my first gift
was a memory: Dorothy Day, decades ago,
gently quoting St. Basil to me: If you have two coats,
you've stolen one from the poor.
Like a walk-in cupboard on the sidewalk, brightly
painted, decked out with flowers, this GiveBox
is for the anonymous exchange of gifts.
You wait a long time for Christmas morning
drifting asleep even as the ebony slate of sky
shatters in clarion silence
Glory, Hallelujah!
and shepherds in the hills cast down their rods
look up at angels and find themselves
no longer huddled in darkness
but lucent between the stars.
He uproots teeth primordial in nature and that eat his soul
with appetite the size of mercenary forces plundering a city
whose inhabitants do not fight back because most of them
are women, children, and animals that creep on all fours.
He knows of a city not spared and is without name, unlike Nineveh,
whose repentant king decreed:
Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth,
and they shall cry mightily to God.
About love she was all wrong,
the old capitalist, patron saint
of the self-made rich. How well
she misunderstood the paradox deep
as mothers’ grief: that finding our self
requires losing it, that love and loss
make one truth, not two. Objective
as granite in relationships, her hero
never collapses into cancer with a wife,
never drops into death with a brother.
On Proverbs 8
My saints won’t be named by a church.
Their sainthood won’t stand as statues. Listen.
Voices
calm as cooking directions
play continually—
If any thing’s resurrectible, it’s memory:
those eyes,
song-haloed, so full of lightness
nothing could stop their flight;
not a Thomas who peers into pupils’ darkness,
not a ravenous soul left grounded.
We are born, yin-yanged, of lightning
with saints and putti the lightest of all.
But love-rumpled faces, quick limbs, and pierced hearts
are unstable, done only in clay.
There is nothing casual
about casualties of war.
It is serious business deciding
which of the wounded
get Medevac’d or left behind
on the battlefield.
It is not the ones
with the most severe of injuries
who are transported
elsewhere for treatment
but the ones with the best
chance of surviving them
that make the trip.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
You can’t desire to catch the sacred fish
as much as he desires to be caught
& yet
he darts through the dim depths
with tail swerve & swish
laughs with the joy of glistening fins
at huge holes in your net
through which he swims
To get the shining coin from his mouth
is worth selling all you have
To get him even better
Everything you know about him
wavers in uneven light
Denial
This has nothing to do with blackness.
This has everything to do with blackness.
Anger
I could break things
but everything is broken.
Bargaining
Maybe I should have left
with the slave catchers.
We are the lay of the land— / pocked, hilled, knowing every ember / and seed imprinted on our bones.
While he was in jail, two policemen / came to his apartment, took / all his books, sat at his kitchen table / drinking his coffee, and cut out / the forbidden words: kitchen / was first to go;
There were two sets of stairs: the front ones curving and formal while the backstairs rose steep as a canyon wall. As a girl, I used to fly from their heights when I wasn’t falling.
The amaryllis bulb, dumb as dirt, inert, how can anything spring from this clod, this stone, the pit of some subtropical, atypical, likely inedible fruit?
We all knew it would come.
Someday. Always later.
Mañana.
It comes for us all. Sure.
Of course.
We know that. Someday.
Mañana.
But when someday draws near
for someone you love
whose silenced breath sears
your lungs with flames of grief
and sobs so immense
you wonder:
How dare the sun ascend?
The stars to shine?
Even the yeast to rise!
Eschewing perfection, they knotted in a flaw,
the human signature and kink that made
the carpet whole -- not less perfect, but more
for the fraying edge, the bleeding dyes
that cloak their treasure in disguise,
an act of indirection modeled from on high:
as when the Deity said Be ...
and out crawled -- the twisted,
the crippled, the deformed.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
Touched your hem / A thousand times / A face just / Beyond my sight / Space between / Grace, grief