Under Heaven

Happy am I, for I decay.
A mist like lace turns gray
without light, in a river crevice
where time kissed sand wet.

My knuckle cracks and the little
clot of blood is a sunspot, a missal.
My teeth wear flat. My hands pray.
Happy am I, for I decay.

Quetza

We were heading toward winter, the sun was passing.
You told jokes in clear sounds. You talk in your room.
You said, Let me tell you something funny
about people using each other but
we knew the snow was coming, and you
would all drive like mad priestesses, and the fire
of summer was behind us. In the fourth season,
the cement would be covered in ice,
and the graveyard would be dangerous. Even
the stones might split, and all the words break,
unless, like the old, white, washed off ones,
they are already broken.

And all our friends gave up trying to command.
And all our friends sat down drinking, spinning cards.
I watched you crying just over your eyelids with your cheeks red,
when no one else saw you take diamonds from the dealer. Even you,
little in your grip, wished maybe hands could choose
just the right thing for you, tellingly; for everyone at once.
You left half of the whiskey in your glass, and at ten
you fell backwards, hugging yourself.

But I was angry, and sober, and the sun was passing.
I went down into the basement, where we found
the mouse that morning trapped underneath
the glass jar, twitching.     Tl       tli         li
While you and all the rest cried yourselves to sleep
I said, if we can't find transcendence, I'll build it.

Driving back, where the traffic is trapped
by construction for widening the road,
and all the red lights looked like a serpent
sliding through a plastic tube,
            I watched the moon.
It was cool, and silver, slithering higher
than the glowing contrails of jets, a coin
minted in the same shape as the world
dropping down the slot of a game machine.

So I worked in the damp. I worked
in the moldy chair, where water seeps
up from the ground, and the dryer
spins warm lint like wool; and I
had tears in my eyes too, but it wasn't
just from cold and I had my mind.
The sun was passing,
and somehow I knew I wasn't dying,
because even though I was dying,
and the sweat on my back, and the hair,
were sticky with fuzz and cruel words,
I remembered what you yelled at me,
I could have died happy! but then
you fell asleep in bed, and woke again
like a fit of epilepsy, and didn't say anything.

Taking pages and pages of books, cut
with scissors, and sheets of plastic, and paint
sticks, and fluorescent tape, and calendars;
taking tights, and some small pieces of unfolded
clothing, pasting them with flour and gluing it all over
with fragments of glass, I held it up to the light.
Whiskey is like lightning, and drinking it,
you breathe fire, but it tires you out. You are
only a dragon for a day, or an hour.
Words and words that had never seen each other
stuck together, flapping. My eyes ran
with the brightness, it was all like floating feathers,
and a thousand gazes, s(eeing, for once, )elfish,
so I wrapped it around me like a blanket,
walked down the front steps, past you passed out
on the couch, and followed the lines on the road.
I walked under the lamps. The light touched me.

You were asleep, twitching. I watched your eyes
roll, your hand signing wishes. Standing over
the silver rims of all the empty glasses, and
the flush and glow of cheeks thin with blood,
the sun was passing, and it was past.
I laughed softly, and laid my new coat down
to keep you warm. Finally, you laughed.

Spoken Word

Read aloud:


--
Seed

I always thought a farm of God would spring from soil bright with mica.
That any book he wrote would be sung like Psalms and read like Ezra.

But I'm like a patch of lichen hanging on the side of a dry rock
or a book with a broken binding waiting to be found and rebound.
One of those dead men that speak to me said 'the sky is made for rain'
so I'm here waiting, looking forward to a fertile valley and a field of grain.

Because, yes, I have this feeling floating through me like a cloud,
that I'll ripen or be plowed, that words in ink will still be true aloud;
that I won't rot, I won't wither, the sun won't scorch, the sounds won't die.
So I trust, and I have trusted. I will trust, though there's no water in the sky.

Is it pride that makes me wonder why my stunted arms aren't soaring branches?
Or why my dusty thoughts fall out in crackling prose and clumsy stanzas?
See, I've heard a lot of promises and some of them are written here,
but I myself can't see them, hanging in the wind and waiting, year to year.

And, yes, I have this feeling that crawled in and never left
that I'll ripen in good season, someone will read the pages in my chest.
I won't rot, I'm not an empty tome, the indifferent breeze won't dry me out.
No, I trust that he's a still small voice but sometimes I just wish that he would shout.

That the sky would blacken and all the air would fill, become a flood,
and all the rocks and hills and all the oceans waters would be turned to mud.
That every little prophet in the room would rise and shout his name,
that all the earth would drown in fire and water, and I would do the same.

Why isn't there some miracle for me? Or for the wider world?
Why promises, why writings, why the self, the soul with the edges curled?
My cover shut, the pages yellow, still, there is some ink along my spine,
and sometimes drops from distant rain come trickling down and ask.
Ask my tongue to grow a vine.

Flood Waters

Higher than the mountain and deeper than the sea...

We started out hugging and smiling and full from dinner and that car nearly slammed into us right at the beginning, before we were even on the highway. The street was still dry. It's the first time my tires screamed like that. We both thought we were going to smash right through the driver's side.


Somehow, smoothly, emphatically, gently, in middle of the turn and at full speed, we stopped. They stopped. We weren't four inches apart. Our headlights glowed into each other. I waited one heart beat, pressed the pedal down, and we moved off. I laughed. Katie sighed. Not four inches.

...From the breadth of the east unto the west...

...Somewhere in between forever and this passing day

there's a place where moth and rust cannot lay waste...

She shook the bottle to mix thirty-six ounces of cold, instant coffee. I kept my eyes on the flooded road while she drank.

'It's actually not that bad'.

She was wrong. It tasted metallic, plastic, acidic and muddy. I swallowed as much as I could, probably more than half. 

'No, that's bad.' 

She laughed.

'I must not drink enough coffee or something.'

'Well, it will get us home. But, I mean, yuck.'

She laughed again.

...This is grace, the face of love.


...Stronger than the wildest horses and the rising tide

the chords of death hung so heavy round our necks...

A double-rig semi was towering over our right side when we hit the water at seventy miles an hour. Both vehicles slid. The wheel didn't control the car. A sheet of spray leapt up from the truck's tires and covered the windshield, the windows, everything. We were totally covered, totally blind, and out of control. The lights of the traffic diffused into an orange canopy while we swam forward. I didn't dare touch the brakes; just stayed still, completely still. Side to side. Blind. Forward. Blind. Gold. Red. Water and then, in an instant, air.

And we passed through.

Flood waters rise, but they won't wash away 

Love never dies, it will hold on...

I turned off the music and held the phone to my ear. 

Dad answered just as Mom pulled open the passenger door with the rain splashing her shoulders, hair and glasses. She was already talking, reaching in, laughing.

'Oh, never mind, mom's up. You guys are up.'

'Yeah!'

'I'll see you in a minute.' I could barely hear him over Mom. 'We'll just come inside.'

'Yeah.'

'Love you.'

'You too.'

'See you.'

I pulled the key. 

The lights turned off and I sat in the driver's seat for a minute, wide awake. Mom ran back in the house. Rain ran from the garage onto my hood. I grabbed my backpack and slid out, locking the car behind me.

Peace

He stood so blindly by you,
while you pulsed against your name,
you strain and all the ties of your heart
twisted harder, were climbed by stinging
insects. Prickle by fierce cold,
danced far over by violent clouds.
You wait, and your whole breast
swelled with

                         against your flat stomach.
You were everywhere blue, and he
stood by never looking in, on, over,
never leaning forward. He walked to one
corner, through one rain, to one false gap
in the buildings, down one street where maybe

but did not.

By It I See

With the sun about to lay a foil of gold
on the hedge, to bring light buzzing
from the east, some form of shoulders
emerging from between the trees and the shed,
don't give up on your green eyes.
You have been alone watching wind
shake the poplars. There is no shape of smile in the bud

rising up among the hothouse herbs
on the window sill where Light curves through glass
like a cracked love through clay, a watering can
running with rain through a leaking side. Given
what? What light? To start with; need, the people, fragments
unpatched, a bare trunk where leaves spin,
separate, hopes rot, lonely eyes slump, unseen,

go bloodshot, smear, cry, crack. An unwashed glass
of sorrow, a thirst of the heart lashes you
in yourself shut, tired, tied by grafting wire.
What does the east have to do with me, a single dry sapling?
Do eyes see to see nothing? Someone let the garden go wild,
a change of heat to the rain whistling, the red kettle
drawing thin steam in the air. A sound tangles roots

just out of sight below the soil, when it comes
the way the sun tells the story, at the end
of a sad year. It dies. Before it comes again,
in the moment when the first green pinch leaves
your soft eye, a moth with veined wings flies off,
a body, an ash in the face of ash appearing to yourself
seeing light between me and the sorrow. Light between.

Brave

My little sister who can't breathe,
sitting on a bench outside the barber's,
eleven years old and kicking her feet,
watching the cars go by and hoping that sometime
air will fill her up again.

Oh, little sister with skinny legs, afraid
that this is your last tear, turned to vapor
with the tip of your finger. For a moment
let your eyes watch the light bending inside
the round roof and turning the sunshot trees
upside down, like a spark of the flame
eating up your chest.

It can be seen, tasted, walked on, watched
but not talked about. It turns the saddest twigs
for a single instant into the wick of sudden fire.
In the vapor of boiling salt water, in every second
that comes before relief, breath, it runs in
like the ocean. It cuts the old hair clean.