mother-ground

is printed with iridescent fish, each facing

a different direction. I bought it for you

at the Portland Goodwill our last semester

in college. Spring break we brought it camping.

I pretended I’d eaten sardines before, pretended

I liked them. I don’t remember what you said

when the condom broke. Probably ‘Oh, shit.’

The next day we drove into town. I took a pill

and another pill and it was over. I couldn’t tell

the difference, could have told my friends

but didn’t, just made lots of dead baby jokes

and went to bed in your dorm room.

You’d put painter’s tape on all the edges.

With the pillowcase, it was like living in

the blueprint of an aquarium. I slept there

the night I smoked Sasha’s weed and you

stayed up for hours rubbing my back, telling

fairytales so I wouldn’t totally lose it.

I slept there the night I tried reading you

Haruki Murakami’s Sleep but fell asleep. I slept

there the night after the day I lost

the bet and had to wear a lampshade on my

head and your professor said ‘Nice hat.’ Later I learned

she owns a lamp in the shape of a woman.

I slept there the night you said ‘I think I’m

falling in love with you,’ igniting a great unendurable

belongingness, like a match in a forest fire.

I burned so long so quiet you must have wondered

if I loved you back. I did, I did, I do.

i am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that i catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what i said to myself about myself when i was sixteen and twentysix and thirtysix even thirtysix but i am running into a new year and i beg what i love and i leave to forgive me

Like all who believe in the senses, I was an accountant, copyist, statistician. Not registrar, witness. Permitted to touch the leaf of a thistle, the trembling work of a spider. To ponder the Hubble’s recordings. It did not matter if I believed in the party of particle or of wave, as I carried no weapon. It did not matter if I believed. I weighed ashes, actions, cities that glittered like rubies, on the scales I was given, calibrated in units of fear and amazement. I wrote the word it, the word is. I entered the debt that is owed to the real. Forgive, spine-covered leaf, soft-bodied spider, octopus lifting one curious tentacle back toward the hand of the diver that in such black ink I set down your flammable colors.

Love me stupid.

Love me terrible.

And when I am no

mountain but rather

a monsoon of imperfect

thunder love me. When

I am blue in my face

from swallowing myself

yet wearing my best heart

even if my best heart

is a century of hunger

an angry mule breathing

hard or perhaps even

hopeful. A small sun.

Little & bright.

When we are driving in the dark, on the long road to Provincetown, when we are weary, when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look, I imagine us rising from the speeding car. I imagine us seeing everything from another place-- the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless fields of the sea. And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us, but which we cherish. And what we see is our life moving like that along the dark edges of everything, headlights sweeping the blackness, believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things. Looking out for sorrow, slowing down for happiness, making all the right turns right down to the thumping barriers to the sea, the swirling waves, the narrow streets, the houses, the past, the future, the doorway that belongs to you and me.

What you thought was the sound of the deer drinking at the base of the ravine was not their soft tongues entering the water but my Love tying my bow tie. We were in our little house just up from the ravine. Forgive yourself. It’s easy to mistake her wrists for the necks of deer. Her fingers move so deftly. One could call them skittish, though not really because they aren’t afraid of you. I know. You thought it was the deer but they’re so far down you couldn’t possibly hear them. No, this is the breeze my Love makes when she ties me up and sends me out into the world. Her breath pulled taut and held until she’s through. I watch her in the mirror, not even looking at me. She’s so focused on the knot and how to loop the silk into a bow.

Love is apart from all things. Desire and excitement are nothing beside it. It is not the body that finds love. What leads us there is the body. What is not love provokes it. What is not love quenches it. Love lays hold of everything we know. The passions which are called love also change everything to a newness at first. Passion is clearly the path but does not bring us to love. It opens the castle of our spirit so that we might find the love which is a mystery hidden there. Love is one of many great fires. Passion is a fire made of many woods, each of which gives off its special odor so we can know the many kinds that are not love. Passion is the paper and twigs that kindle the flames but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes because it tries to be love. Love is eaten away by appetite. Love does not last, but it is different from the passions that do not last. Love lasts by not lasting. Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire for his sins. Love allows us to walk in the sweet music of our particular heart.

Enough of osseous and chickadee and sunflower and snowshoes, maple and seeds, samara and shoot, enough chiaroscuro, enough of thus and prophecy and the stoic farmer and faith and our father and tis of thee, enough of bosom and bud, skin and god not forgetting and star bodies and frozen birds, enough of the will to go on and not go on or how a certain light does a certain thing, enough of the kneeling and the rising and the looking inward and the looking up, enough of the gun, the drama, and the acquaintance’s suicide, the long-lost letter on the dresser, enough of the longing and the ego and the obliteration of ego, enough of the mother and the child and the father and the child and enough of the pointing to the world, weary and desperate, enough of the brutal and the border, enough of can you see me, can you hear me, enough I am human, enough I am alone and I am desperate, enough of the animal saving me, enough of the high water, enough sorrow, enough of the air and its ease, I am asking you to touch me.

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.” Insha’Allah I will see you next summer. The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain. So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers. Every language must have a word for this. A word our grandmothers uttered under their breath as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon, hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes, dropping the discarded skins into a bowl. Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah the rice will be enough to last through winter. How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next.

Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus

—Livy

We are like strangers in the wild places. We watch

the deer swinging the intricate velvet from its antlers, never knowing

we are only as immense as what we shed in the dance.

The bride and bridegroom stand at the altar. Each thing

learned in mercy has a river in it. It holds the cargo

of a thousand crafts of fire that went down at evening.

We can neither endure our misfortunes nor face

the remedies needed to cure them. The fawns move

through the forest, and we move through the ruins of the dance.

Like Job, the mourner lays his head on the cold oak

of the table. His heart is a hundred calla lilies

under the muck of the river, opening before evening.

We think there is another shore. We stand with the new life

like a mooring rope across our shoulders, never guessing

that the staying is the freightage of the dance.

Orpheus turned to see his Eurydice gone. The Furies tore him

into pieces. The sun, he said, I will worship the sun.

But something in his ruin cried out for evening, evening, evening.

The wrens build at dusk. Friends, I love their moss-dressed

nests twisting in the pitch of the rafters, for they have taught me

that the ruins of the dance are the dance.

What is it they say      about hands that feed      & that word made known to us by      the shape of its entry      which is also      the shape of its leaving I bite into that      after which objects made      for fastening or agony are named & call it      my jaw’s keratin prayer      to whatever continues after good bone ends      the body’s pain at last      obedient to the shrill whistle of skin’s closure      with just my mouth      I’ve found the neat seam of grief’s thick gown      split my blood from      its dogged heat & gaped that wound      into something a girl      could pass through this blue shore upon      which someone sharpens      the thumb’s crescent shell into a furious moon      tender with newness      its only purpose to keep its sky      from emptiness the way      I cannibalize hurt to keep my belly full      watch me gut      my own extinction      sure it’s ugly to say I can      be touched by gravity      without being habitable how planets in orbit      bear their ends beneath      the ground’s deep rush I too was born      to tongue mercy      & grew teeth around it      watch me build a scaffold      my knees will never      crush themselves to watch me swallow      the hardest thing      my body has made      & live

A man can’t die where there is no earth because there will be no place to bury him. His body is the sky and understands the language of birds. His body says the earth is made of everything that has fallen from Heaven while no one was looking. He promises to defy gravity and then return home. A man can’t reach for the sky and not feel he is falling. It goes on forever and the birds talk about the awesomeness of flight while the oxen labor in the fields, while the cows eat grass and dream of slaughter. A man can’t talk about flight because one day, there will be no sky, just the body covered in earth. And now the sky is empty of birds. And now the earth is covered in flowers.

I looked at all the trees and didn't know what to do. A box made out of leaves. What else was in the woods? A heart, closing. Nevertheless. Everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else. I kept my mind on the moon. Cold Moon, Long Nights Moon. From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale. I turned my back on a story. A sense of superiority. Everything casts a shadow. Your body told me in a dream it's never been afraid of everything.

What occurs to me, now two decades after I broke the earth beneath me leaving second base, is that, instead of an insult, I was perhaps a new god, having been called something other than my name in a holy trinity before, during and after the game. It might have been Groveport, or Lancaster or any territory Ohio lays claim to honestly, every town is different except for what they will wield at you. I rounded third base, towards a litany of nigger and nigger. How fortunate to have someone waiting for you as you return home. How blessed to be left to interpret your worshippers because they love you enough to name you themselves.

It was not the first time my mother threw me out of the house and cranked the stereo till the screen door rattled and you could hear the music down the street. It was June 17th. Scorching. I was seven and knew how to stay gone— there was a storm drain at the end of the street where I’d sit in the silt, dig my fingers into the warm black tar around the grate and wait for the music to subside. I expected the Beatles. But the sound that poured from the windows was a slow burn samba, the slither of doubled guitar, and the serrated scrape of a guiro. The storm drain caught the sound, and it echoed in my chest. Twenty-five years before, my mother did her hair in tin can curls and hopped the streetcar to Westview Danceland where the unknown Stones covered Buddy Holly and the blues. Her father was alive then. She wore green jeans for spite because he’d forbidden blue. I know that now. I know Danceland burned to the ground and I know the man who turned up on our porch that day before my mother threw me out was the love of her life, that the look he gave me before she turned him away was the look of a man seeing his own grave. But at the storm drain, I only knew that the crack in Merry Clayton’s voice as she screamed rape, murder was the sound of all my unnamed fury and the low drone of Keef’s open tuning was the dread that hung like a coat in my ribcage, and, oh, children, I knew my mad bull mother and I sometimes felt the same things, Let it Bleed played loud enough to make your ears ring.