#creative wiritng

Plummet.

Gravity is nothing more than falling

Back to the first hand that held you.

Red threads of your body describe

The languages of return -

Featherlike. Wingless. Prayers without mouths.

Marks unmade on terracotta.

You look like the scent of watercolour clouds

Traversed by fallen suns

In centuries yet to come. Black on orange,

A shadow too heavy to hold.

Wear the weather like wax, puckering torches,

White-lipped at death’s shoulder,

Carrying the words as if they too were

Stitched to your back -

A question beheld to the sea

Still burning.

Umber Embers 9.18.21 “Where Did the Day Go?”

Weeks are filled with sidewalk days Pacing steps in a fugue-state haze Where the time bleeds like a marker Through each page, the colors getting darker

Shorten and lengthen each and every stride Avoid the cracks, ever since mother died Watch her rock back and forth in the den Was that yesterday, tomorrow, today, or when?

Where is the ending, Mr. Silverstein spoke of? Passed Shell stations on every corner, littered with doves This street is familiar, never having been driven Enough left turns, and the route might be forgiven

If you too bore of bleeding clocks Follow the path, out to the boardwalks Wave at the ocean, it will return in kind Shifting and sifting, unfettered by grind

When the night sky bares her sweetness In the water she’ll melt like sugar, disappear like Loch Ness Step upon the surface reflection Headed toward the horizon, of tomorrows hopeful direction

I couldn’t follow you, but I know the platforms

Emptied in their usual ways.

I know you shut the door with such ordinary care.

I expected something to resist, including myself.

I could talk to you even as the world ends

And in some lives I know I wrote to you.

I rise, wash, and walk among the living.

Its breaking should have left a greater crack.

Should I make a cup of coffee

Or do the other thing Camus suggested?

But he never said that, did he.

It has taken a life of its own.

Gibran said he loved his enemy

By loving himself, and thereby obeyed God,

Just as light is two things at once, as is the fog -

A breath held by a surface of glass.

Clocks turn back and even time is not itself.

Autumn gnaws the Summer open like a soft torch.

What has bewitched us. Which branches grow

At the second-best time to plant a tree.

Instead of your name I find the words of others

In the corridors where we never met.

I wake. I take the bus to work. I write emails.

Nothing on Earth has told me otherwise.

My life has happened out of order.

I rise, wash, and walk among the living.

“I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am.”

- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals

Rainfall rattles the summer to pieces.

I hear our cadence in its broadcasts;

Its meter and the quiver and the surge.

We are mid-transmission, the sound between

All sounds that sticks like the memory of

Touch. We are unfinished, yet know

That sound for which all sounds were named -

A word, or countless remembered languages

Recalling the moment that all seas

Were innocent rivers drinking away time.

Impermanent rain drums on the skylight.

Follow the water home, just like always;

Just like the damp unravelling Augusts

Insist on souls that were once caterpillars

That were once mulch that was once starlight

As the first sigils to lift us from the dirt.

Sodden air returns the memories of books

Like memories of sleep, soft and vivid

As the moth-scents of moon-glow on wet glass.

We taste the time when the world was first named

In such incense, recalling from other selves

The true purpose of tongues. Here I can hear us,

The arrhythmia of raindrops becoming

The constituent parts of your voice and chest -

Disjointed but radiant in constellation.

Perhaps now we are more than just templates

Of people. Perhaps here is the space

You used to live beside the river

Where grasses palmed the down of waterfowl

Into scraps of your many incarnations.

Tilt your head and they could be glyphs

For songs or psalms or cries or incantations

Coalescing into goose-winged summonings

Of me as flat-footed and near-fingerless,

Cupping a plume with bird-awkward hands.

How can you expect me to lift such things,

Like pulling my soul from the ground again?

Its shadows have not been invented, yet,

But its eulogies have, leached of your skin

When you covered the sun with a feather

And smiled like a song stolen from a dream.

I hear them with my eyes in another world,

Where circlets of ladybirds open up,

Blossom into planets or lakes or leaves,

Murmuring dormant trees into greenery -

And I am destroyed by this great spell

Of undoing, rooted in my own Earth,

Elsewhere, where an insect is just an insect.

You are conjured, my quieting hymn,

Oil-scried of moments that were more than moments.

I have no words. I can but ask you to reach

Into this poem, wraith-like, and gently

Cup its magma like an unborn child.

Pour yourself into its formless ear

Through the parentheses of your fingers

Until you clasp the ore of its organs,

Pressed into iridescent eyes of prophets.

We could cover the sun with these trinkets, too.

We could cover all things in metal-green,

Indistinct, where it’s hard to make out your face

But the chrome pulls the sky into the earth

And we walk on clouds in shoes of verdant moonlight

And I hope that your eyes are earthquakes,

The beauty and wreckage of roiling magma

In constant making and unmaking.

Cracked, the mantle of your irises

Will unburden themselves, their depth and fury

As inevitable as the turning Earth.

And I hope that your heart is a sunflower

Tracing your ancestral starfire Eastwards,

Fearing not its manifested insects

Because you know in your blood that love

Is both the hushed footprints of honeybees

And their shadows over unborn blossom.

And I hope that your forearms are a kiln

Reforging your hands as porcelain birds;

Creatures of fissures and shatterings that sing

Beautifully of cataclysms, despite

Our deafness to broken things, because dust

And fragments conceive every offered palm.

And I hope that your ribs are a satellite;

Arc-light tracing geometries of silence

That know movement is just distance

and falling.

You, too, would be a keeling glow, tumbling

Around the planets that rattle through our heads

To grasp the gravity of each thought.

And I hope that your throat is the snowfall

And the thaw and their serenities,

Raking the sky with dreaming tree-lines

Or calling the shred of topsoil with ice;

The dead world and the warming lung

Borrowing the urgency of bird-flight.

And somewhere in the space between all things

Archangel, scent of starfire on the lake,

Cultivator of boatwood, aura-bearer

Of the chart-hands and ocean-seers -

You are hereby declared unfit for office.

We have climbed the titan of your shoulder

To slay the feathered things of your back

And cast the shrapnel into radio waves.

We have spanned the colossus of your brow

And quarried your corneas for telescopes,

Planted in the empty gods of your femurs.

We have unwound the pigments of your hair

But never found the calculus of heaven

As the colours died grieving the distance.

Archangel, water-light of old galleons,

Waste of your unmaking falls back to us

Until you are known only by the ripples

Of that same water; cobalt-orange

Like a sunset remembered from a distant

Continent, or a love left unspoken,

Or a language made to speak of horizons.

You are forgiven, unanointed beast,

For thinking we needed more than your body.

You are forgiven for thinking you were enough.

The ruin of your face redraws the cantos

That first woke you from the nothingness,

And the last powders of divinity

Melt on the dimming light-blade of your tongue:

Envy of the beetle pyres. Envy them their churn.

Envy of the nebulae they build and shroud and burn.

Envy the mycelia. Envy them their dross.

Envy every constellation made of dregs and loss.

Envy of the comet-falls. Envy them their height.

Envy as their yaws undo the stasis of the night.

Envy of the frogspawn. Envy them their mire.

Envy as the clot grows limbs to pull apart the briar.

Envy of the lunar lamps. Envy them their caste.