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.

35 - Borderline

There’s a mad devil at my center,

drives me out to my fingertips

and feet to live gutlessly

by touch and taking. I press

my hands on anything to keep

nerve fires alive on the outskirts of

my bad neighborhood heart. I

empty pleasures into other skins,

fluoresce along electric spines

and ride the spin of rooms

adrift in foamy wash of spirits,

slip through bends of typeset notes

on truth and fictions

overstating certainty in black.

But dark is fear of not seeing

what roams about in here.

They say my empty

is only God-need.

But it’s God threw everything

of use out, put up fences, and now 

there’s a mad devil at my center

rattling the ribcage

that keeps me out.

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.

25 - You Only Get What You Give

Girl knew she would have troubles.

The church handed her womanhood

on a silver platter. They said:

“Make sure everyone is served.”

23 - Follow Your Natural Bliss!

My family raised me a skeptic of disease,

an atheist scornful of diagnostic gods,

and Hippocratic demagogues who would ensnare us

in fear of a treacherous body.

Infection’s perfidy, we knew, was cheap suspense

like any flimsy drugstore paperback,

like Gideons’ gift to weakened travelers.

We respectfully knew not to lambast the medical tradition,

but it wasn’t ours for use. It belongs to foreign realms,

where holy books of clinical narrative knit up the parts

of anatomical mystery into ethnic motifs:

Avicenna’s Pahlavi patterned roots,

wax cloth animalcules of Leeuwenhoek,

Vesalius’ woven Fabrica Corporis Humani.

Artifacts of the culturally early.

Enchanted modern minds still literarily tour the halls of Kos,

but remember this asklepeion has met Atlantis’ fate.

Too much love for myth bespeaks the folly of

malingerers, of fools.

Wise folk put those mad compendiums away.

I huddle in a bedsheet tent, flashlight turned

to pale my face, to mimic death’s angelic visitation,

my body transformed into a text of fantastical plague

I will read after dark and in secret.

One hand to my chest to catch the shudders

of elaborate coughing, such hellhound barks

that rattle my bedframe’s brass knobs.

I am hot in the bright with a countenance of fever,

so I prey on my health for deliverance,

honing the taboo art of summoning

the Catarrh demon for testament

to my possession by mortal ills.

They’ve denied that I’m sick for years, by now,

but I believe, I believe, I believe…

Yes, the skeptical method trumps all superstition,

and we soberly forfeit those childish things.

No Pasteurian oracle of etiologies can foretell

the body’s sovereign courses,

no pharmic idolatry procures

the myopic dreams of men.

Paracelsus’ opiates shall never

be suffered to dull the reckonings

of nature in we who are

fearfully and wonderfully made.

19 - We All Felt Sorry For Ourselves

At the funeral, her grandfather

explained why.

The car’s burnout was apt;

she needed purity,

so God came.

The casket was closed,

we each kept our own

favorite ideas.

March, two days later, I huddled over

a grease-sheer paper bag of warmth,

McFries on the El platform floor,

southbound at night.

Her train was headed the other

way, but she smiled,

in pity maybe.

It seemed kind, yet

the door closed,

and I had the particular guilt

of a person using junk

to feel better about

some indignity.

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.

16 - Evangelicalism

Their warding curses
write in gold and black.
The first, enforcing rarity.
Second, making sure we don’t
forget our getting off the track;
conjuring one unseen eternity
in front and leaving yet
another nigh and chasing
at the back.

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.

9 - Christmas Casket

You built a box for the birth of salvation.

It was cedarwood, stained.

Nestled underneath a Yuletide spruce, the hope

chest crouched like some anthropic bud

off the conifer’s dying body,

trampling its skirt with

blockish feet.

It was ugly, misaligned, and guilting:

The lid was crowned in twisted,

viney wire, applied with spikes

driven down in woodflesh,

and opened, you could see

the tips protrude inside,

reminders, maybe, of your

hard toil.

You would always remind

us of your

hard toil.

Resin-scent would henceforth be

everpresent at my bedfoot,

cloaking me in the aromatic

afterlife of trees

and filling my throat

with presence,

an admonition that my future

was your gift.

I was meant to make my dowry in it,

Assembling the sundry lot of

coupled life:

towels, cookery, bedthings.

But I filled it with

cheap, broken junk.