&REA

This story has two endings.

It has one ending

and then another.

Do you hear me?

I do not have the heart

Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars

I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders

deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest

People are not wanting to let me in

The first things kids learn in school are the seasons. By now they already know their colors, maybe even their last names. My children will learn hurricane and wildfire. It is summer and then it is winter.

They won’t know the sweet weeks of early June, honeysuckle, wearing a sundress without sweat pooling behind a knee. Maybe even a little cold at night.

They might not know bumblebees, not personally. Polar bears they’ll read about like dinosaurs. We’ll still have the old-fashioned disasters, a broken elbow, split lip.

I’ll try not to scare them, but when I see them eating unwashed grapes I’ll tell them about pesticides. One will forget but the other won’t eat fruit for years. When they ask if I believe in heaven I will lie.

When they’re little I want them to feel safe. When they’re older I want them to believe their bones will lie dumb in the earth forever. This is your one life.

They’ll want to know what their parents did before they were born We had dinner parties. Traveled a little, not enough. Read our friends’ books. Had a dog they won’t remember

but will pretend to, and too many plants. Water-damaged the windowsill and lost our deposit. When our spider plant mothered into twelve stalks, we potted them,

called them spiderettes. They were supposed to be housewarming gifts, but we didn’t know twelve people moving. We tried not using too much plastic, not eating too much meat. It didn’t matter.

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil a friend said, why are you happy? He explained (we lay together on a cold hard floor) what prison meant because he had done time, and I talked of the death of friends. Why are you happy then, he asked, close to angry.

I said, I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands, that I forgot to do some little piece of the work that wanted to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine, the muted light off the waters of the bay at night, the white light of the fog stealing in, the first spears of morning touching a face I love. We all lose everything. We lose ourselves. We are lost.

(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)                                                                                                                     

1 invitation

come coil with me here in creation’s bed among the twigs and ribbons of the past. i have grown old remembering the garden, the hum of the great cats moving into language, the sweet fume of the man’s rib as it rose up and began to walk. it was all glory then, the winged creatures leaping like angels, the oceans claiming their own. let us rest here a time like two old brothers who watched it happen and wondered what it meant.

2 how great Thou art

listen. You are beyond even Your own understanding. that rib and rain and clay in all its pride, its unsteady dominion, is not what you believed You were, but it is what You are; in your own image as some lexicographer supposed. the face, both he and she, the odd ambition, the desire to reach beyond the stars is You. all You, all You the loneliness, the perfect imperfection.

3 as for myself

less snake than angel less angel than man how come i to this serpent’s understanding? watching creation from a hood of leaves i have foreseen the evening of the world. as sure as she the breast of Yourself separated out and made to bear, as sure as her returning, i too am blessed with the one gift You cherish; to feel the living move in me and to be unafraid.

4 in my own defense

what could I choose but to slide along behind them, they whose only sin was being their father’s children? as they stood with their backs to the garden, a new and terrible luster burning their eyes, only You could have called their ineffable names, only in their fever could they have failed to hear.

5 the road led from delight

into delight. into the sharp edge of seasons, into the sweet puff of bread baking, the warm vale of sheet and sweat after love, the tinny newborn cry of calf and cormorant and humankind. and pain, of course, always there was some bleeding, but forbid me not my meditation on the outer world before the rest of it, before the bruising of his heel, my head, and so forth.

6 “the silence of God is God.” —Carolyn Forche

tell me, tell us why in the confusion of a mountain of babies stacked like cordwood, of limbs walking away from each other, of tongues bitten through by the language of assault, tell me, tell us why You neither raised your hand Nor turned away, tell us why You watched the excommunication of That world and You said nothing.

7 still there is mercy, there is grace

how otherwise could I have come to this marble spinning in space propelled by the great thumb of the universe? how otherwise could the two roads of this tongue converge into a single certitude? how otherwise could I, a sleek old traveler, curl one day safe and still beside YOU at Your feet, perhaps, but, amen, Yours.

8 “.........is God.”

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television. It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside – a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs

10 years ago today I tried to end my life. Everything that has happened since then--everything beautiful, tragic, strange--needn’t have been so. And everything that is, will not be so forever, which is both sad and a relief. My life is not perfect, but every year I feel more like one of the living, and less like one of the dead.

This photo is from few days after I was checked into a psychiatric facility 10 years ago. When I look at it now, I see my eyes full of sadness and fear. I think about how young I was and how little I understood about how good things might become. And I think about how grateful I am to be alive in maybe the only place in the universe where life has ever existed, and how even on days when I feel the darkness closing in, I still usually feel very curious about what will happen next.

And this photo is from last year, on a drive down from Tahoe. I like it because it reminds me of all of the ground traveled in the last 10 years, and all of the things I love about my tiny miraculous life, of which there are too many to name here. But mostly I love how green it is, how verdant and vibrant and bright.

“Wait” by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a little and listen: music of hair, music of pain, music of looms weaving our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

“To The Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks