38 - Going Lightly

Do you remember that famous Christian book about cults?
On the cover spun rainbow waters in a down-drain spiral —

America the melting pot, or, an oil slick was in our sink but it’s going away!

What were we doing on the rim of it?

What was I doing, learning how subtle variations in the gradient out

from pure light all end in the same darkest gone-away?

We were prodigies of collapsing space

forgetting pipes to waterways covering two-thirds

of a planet made just for men, who don’t swim far.

We were forging the ways our bodies go as minds move —

that is, self-limiting, or, why I can’t now unfold all

the crushed wax-paper skies above regions I belatedly see.

The weight of our bones in the world is decided early.

And even as I’ve strained to widen my eyes

for the dim of unholy wilderness I know

the being-in-it feeling is no known quantity of light.

Others muscle in pressing-going through the friction-real;

I stay thin air, where solid things vanish.

31 - So Insulting, So Enlightened

One year, my sister and I

subjected Christmas mythology

to empirical testing.

“Sign here,” scrawled on

cardstock, “if you, Greenie

the Wonder Dog, who we love

so so much, are truly real.”

Then a hand-dotted line,

the length of a linchpin.

Folded over, addressed,

blessed with a gold star sticker,

scotch-taped to the pebbly wall

above the obligatory cookies.

We’d play the powers that be like

cheap psychics fed false

leads on how to flatter us best.

Come morning, bypassing presents

we opened the card to find

our stepfather’s scrawl

dyslexically confirming

the existence of a recently

invented flying dog.

We frowned a little at the gifts,

realizing they had been sacrificed

to the idols of magical thinking.

We both got just what we wanted.

30 - Passer Aux

God fell the morning we kids found

a baby starling on the lawn.

Stepping close cat-softly

our gasping pupils gulped

the light off thick grass

swelled with verdant juice,

arrogant to outdo the absurdity

of a bird in the dirt. Everything

was strange. I pictured

his feet black roots, feathers

shoots and fronds of night

and scattered white seeds

for planting flight in Earth.

But silent, hurt, and sunk in

adolescent bloat his downy

starscape a wilt of absent heaven,

stolen on the descent.

Order: passeriforme, passeri

same as those penny-sparrows who

never fall without the Father.

We tucked the little aeronaut

into a shoebox bed and blanket,

cradled as the car flew to

wherever white-gloved

ministers could right this

blot on invincible birdhood.

We couldn’t stay to see

if he would fly again, though

they all smiled nicely

in that lying way.

Who is responsible for flight?

Where does it go when birds die?

De passer à travers ma vie,

passer aux oubliettes,

mes passereaux infinie.

29 - I Turned My Face to Funerary Skies

The hermit moon is sheathed

again in midnight’s sable purse.

Stars pinprick dull and depthless points,

frail phantoms comforting starved eyes.

My let breath stops short, goes nowhere.

There is just the fact of night.

In darkness past, I might have prayed

my heart into the hot rapture of bats

roiling smoky through the shapely,

generous black. Following echoes of

my own cries. But I’m no longer lofty.

Bent, I read the blank book of moonless dusk,

soul a cool bone cup to hold night’s ink.

To write, again and once again, the joy

of a black and indifferent heaven.

17 - Pentecost

In modest drape of cornflower

crepon, curl-shawled an uncut

crown, the bride of fire stands on

flat soles for her anointing.

Oil-crossed brow like a bullseye

for the Spirit, her uptilt gaze

guides congregant eyes in heliac rising,

so the Son may set on them again.

They robe her in a sweat-silk cloak

of coaxing palms, invoke the Lord of

Pleas, open her throat.  She’ll spread her

lips for tongues of flame and beg.

But this is sober witchery. She utters

incantations, spells a hex on recognition,

mutters nonsense dulcet choruses

they seize as holy kinsong.

In their hot tumult of lit-wick bliss,

her soul is a small cool stone.

She spends them, and she sates them

and she departs unwed, lone

celibate among the saints.

15 - Soteriological Experiments in Luddism

You will amble a transient on

grit-packed freeway shoulders, turn heads

in panopticon windows, the car-borne

surveilling your mendicance.

In the wind of their passing find written

the key to moralities of speed,

in your face flush the heat

of some primal shame

jumbled with an older dignity

you don’t yet understand.

Still your limbs in pace with

no purpose, and shrug

off the suit of excuse for your

being a walker: this is

unlike your to’s of the

routine morning. And you will bear

the hard scorn of concrete

and its swift patrons,

capsulate fleet of militant

goers belying the arbitrary sky.

But heaven stretches in every direction.

Your body will learn its courses

in this dissolute vault, where

vagrants find absolution for

the vagueness of being.

4 - Prayer for Stagnant Waters

See, a shred of police caution tape
yellow trampled and tucked
into a pine chip bed:
the quiet of crimes.
This place,
dappled with wrung lemon rinds
bottle mouths kissing through
topskin of pond green, bobbing
mallards
the madness of swans,
it swallows the dreams of wakers
forgetting iniquitous night.
At this humid shrine of the languid
I pray for my salvation:
Send my soul with the Gerridae skaters
cross the membrane of tenebrous deep.