Peels of Poetry

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

Mind was a prison, ruby lined in its lipstick noir—everything woman I was expected to be, trapped between papered walls. What they said to do, I did not but only levitated at the burning,

“We know, again from the experts, that Jovellanos, when Goya painted his portrait, had just been appointed the king’s “minister of grace and justice.” This was as much of a liberal, Enlightenment moment—a few months in late 1797 and early 1798—as Spain ever had.” —T.J. Clark

1.

So, then, where is our

Minister of Grace and Justice,              

our minister

for the end of ignorance under the law?

The law’s vulgate. Zap zap                                

you’re dead. Zap for good measure.

Goya’s interior spreads

cartoon stain, red

into the black garb of sabotage.                          

                                       And there, in that city, light                    

shatters into

debris — glass, coin,  

shoe, book. Book?

Look! Look! Can you see the book?

The pages are wet. Can you turn them?

Place your thumb in oil. Blot the spiral out.

2.

History’s horizon

blurs into running crowds,

pitched waves, mobile boundaries

not sanctioned by law. History’s

horizon

contracts into small boats

traversing rough waters.                                                    

Scan the sky’s evening,

golds and greens

more brilliant than a reliquary chalice,

a saint’s crescent. Paint that. Scan

the turbulence for cinders,

white hot dots.                     Matrix

                    of illusion, spurred on by desire and

                                            reason’s catastrophic carrier

                                                pregnant with a god. Sappho’s moon      

                            crossed by the wing of an owl.  Dear gray-eyed

                                  Athena, please allow

transport

safely across the waters. Film that.

3.

Trapped by a ghost, many ghosts, a host

of ghosts. They

do not sing

but stare into a shade

lowered over coins

that mimic sun.

The young man

on the screen is timeless.

He speaks into the unknown

from a blackened room.  We cannot

see his interlocutors nor hear their exhaled

breath.  Meanwhile, in the stadium, thousands

stand to sing in unison

an anthem.

                                                   o say can you see by the dawn’s            

remnant

bombs bursting air.  Record that.

4.

The agenda has a requiem —

brass, percussion, solo baritone

rising over the choral bloom.

Look up and up, the cascade rises!

But the leaves are fallen

and the familial roost divided:

the plural of I is not we.                                  

                And in the not we, we

                         flee

            into the hedge while the machines

    routine their killer noise.

Let’s improvise a story. Let’s begin

with a journey out

onto paths, into meadows, glades,

forests, brackish ponds, scented

lilies on ponds, bees.

Let’s end with a prayer for the bees.

5.

Or these words: Cyber, black,

blessings to spell forth

gifts. Good luck with that and with picking

shards from the pavement oil.

Pilgrim or migrant or

exile traversing the calendar’s stage

with spidery precision. Speak

into the megaphone: cyber, black.                    

Now join the ensemble as it

wanders  from what it was taught

by a preacher, a cop, saved                                    

from the whispering echo:  

I want, I want.

6.

How to quantify a rupture? Sit in its midst

like a bad child in mud. Discipline                                                        

and punish.   Good luck with that.

The global ruse is insupportable

by the local client, she

wants the garden stone

lowered so her child can reach

parsley, sage, rosemary

and thyme,  lyrics

from  the melting pot. Let’s poll the pot                                                                                                

and see how it intends to vote.

Zap. Let’s take a bite from the apple.

Whim over the doorframe, tears in the sink.

7.

Lady natters on about intimacy. She’s a bore

but she’s cornered the market

on intimacy.

She tells us we

need to speak face to face, into

the ensemble of relations that faces are. She

warns against the mirror at our fingertips.

Are you tired of these homilies, these

warnings, these studies that say

we have lost touch? We

know we have lost touch. We

know we are the remnant organs of a bodiless hum.

8.

So an unnamed subject bequeaths

golds, greens, all its auras

into our show. Don’t look now.

Turn away as the hero

walks across a bridge with his              

murderer mistress. He walks

with a side to side motion, his great shoulders

tipping. The water below carries his coat

on sorrow’s bloodied current.

It’s an affecting image of the unendurable

endurance of duration, phenomenal

and cruel. The thing disintegrates, or melts,

like paper in a flood, becoming illegible

as it falls over the embankment.

The hero Luther is named for the hero Luther.

9.

Pick a card, any card.

What did you get? A nine? A queen?

Which? One with black spades or

one with red hearts?  Place your bets.

Let’s get a slice of pizza.

Let’s pick up some eggs, some chard.

Let’s go down to the river

and watch the sun set.

Let’s hope for the best.

                                              The clock is imaginative,

it has time or we imagine it has time.

I’m not sure how to measure

this gift, sanctioned by the stars. They

stay constant although they are dead.

They send what came before what

             with thanks to Pablo Neruda

the past is a poor broken basket, woven by hands that had no muscle, no song. When you forget me, every word we spoke together just before or after slow first light, lips still wet, – doe, heron, stone, prayer – erases itself from every language, as if never spoken. Extinct.

When you forget me, dream of other women, offer them the dance of your heart, recline in a meadow, drink red wine, seek another woman’s blush, what basket could hold all this desire? I’ll gather black maidenhair fern stems, redbud, bear grass from our sacred places; I’ll harvest, split and dry each piece.  My busy hands won’t miss the obsidian outline of your face.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree rustling over a gravesite and making real the dream of the one its living roots embrace:

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

I saw then the white-eyed man leaning in to see if I was ready

yet to go where he has been waiting to take me. I saw then the gnawing

sounds my faith has been making and I saw too that the shape it sings

in is the color of cast-iron mountains I drove so long to find I forgot I had

been looking for them, for the you I once knew and the you that was born

waiting for me to find you. I have been twisting and turning across these lifetimes

where forgetting me is what you do so you don’t have to look at yourself. I saw

that I would drown in a creek carved out of a field our incarnations forged the first path

through to those mountains. I invited you to stroll with me there again for the first time, to pause

and sprawl in the grass while I read to you the poem you hadn’t known you’d been waiting

to hear. I read until you finally slept and all your jagged syntaxes softened into rest.

You’re always driving so far from me towards the me I worry, without you, is eternity. I lay there,

awake, keeping watch while you snored. I waited, as I always seem to, for you

Time will say nothing but I told you so Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show, If we should stumble when musicians play, Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although, Because I love you more than I can say, If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow, There must be reason why the leaves decay; Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow, The vision seriously intends to stay; If I could tell you I would let you know.