The June Period.

She said when you let your hair cascade follow its own torrential current of growth, and when you tie a scarf just so, or show awareness of patterns and interactions, you send a message, you sound rebellious the clarion of some pride, going before, who knows?  Mistakes.

Fruitful, soft flesh touched, flourishes for the taking Darkness and light mingling wisdom and noise Sweetness and festal joy to satisfy the question Goes forth in newness of life, deep heart’s oneness What words occluded, carrying off primeval innocence In cosmic openness presents a table, welcome to all

When you undo the strap of your shoe and step out of the day and into the room at dusk, the unwashed carpet beneath your sole is hallowed. So says the rite and the holy Scripture you trapped in the crannies of your childheart, the place where the larder of joy was meant to grow and be filled. But tonight the god-breathed words and knowledge you collected unconscious are resurrected, same same but different, with the memory of Hërta’s front parlor with its wall of mirrors following the asymmetric A-frame of a new build home, and its yellow carpet neither soft nor ungenerous. When you take off your shoes and your clothes and you bend, and warm the navel into and out of the spine, feet pressed into dirty carpet, the ground on which you walk and love your body unconcerned is sacred.

By the sweat of your brow, and by ineffable thankless toil you shall bring forth fruit from the troubled earth buried fathoms down within, he said to me, the augur of cursed years upon once fertile topsoil— born of sand mixed with clay, manured of death and other produce— humus of my own possession marred beyond my ken, by the anguished pattern of familiar thought and, surprising in the margins of his text by the other ecstasy of strange flesh. If I—emigrant from Paradise with a plough— could yonder thence, to innocence, I might remain in Nod, and excavate new cities underground.

Sloughing off skin in summer like serpents do, or the seventeen-year locust casts down its chitinous frame, useless once unburied, rising to thrum with song, you are young, again alive and ripe.

Mind like a lesion grounds the body in an unreal country. If the wound closes, on which side do we stand, hale or dead?

Raised to the life of the hearthfire in the bosom of his mother's tents he was a pupil of the well-aimed word, turned the teeth of the wolves off his throat never looked his father in the eye, when asked about his brother in the sun the redfaced, blessed brother whose shadow he stood in, always real or unrealized, the greater of two boys. He watched the ebb and wane of heat and spark, simmered the dish of the family table, answered to the name his mother gave him, secret in the territory of the women's tents, and his, student of the sliding word, the rhythmic breath of the crossroads, and pitches in the color of smoke, the different savors of the spheres of men and women, from the wrong side of the threshold, in the hidewomb where she birthed him, and he lied.

Twist a cord and wrap my wrist, a scarlet cord of threads once stretched between defining straight pins on a map, twist my wrist with wrapping cord so to not forget the few full spaces in a history devoid of destination, so to recall, always, that I have promised, in the end, more than I can work for, enough to nourish calamitous hope on and live.

Sleeves of a variegate coat fray at the cuffs, nibbled edges of a favored son scrabbling at the packed adobe slants of an exhausted cistern, and there is no one to blame for the slide the fall, abandon of all paternal blessing asks and none proclaiming severance, recording shame, only the hew and cry of early summer winding above the mouth of the reservoir, emptied by a spring which brought too little. Earth here is red with inheritance but at the cadaverous bottom of the hollow raintrough, favor waits for the blow to fall, disguised in the obvious, in familial comfortude, beneath bequeathals borne of only kindness. The body is a nervous habit to maintain.

Senselessly, sensibly foolish to draw fully closed the door of a wardrobe your clothes are inside, stupid, you'll be naked without anyway.

Continued a day not half over at the German/American discount grocery, parking  next to three women in cape dresses, covered, loading their hired trailer with dry goods—and dairy, inside the frontmost rack of milk we'd find ungalloned—chattering Dutch away, unconscious of eyes upon them, not glancing, their road to the English town once traveled, complete.

Don't leave a stock to simmer unattended, without intending first to not forget that even low heat in time scorches bottom-most broth, charred carbons shading all the rest.

Matte and frame and hang from naked walls a lexicon and atlas of the new. Run steaming water down my midnight spine when silence in my head will not close up. Finally learn to cook a meal for one instead of eating four meals' worth in two. Pick up and ride the train to a line's end and take the free day mapping my way back. Write and revise and tattoo dappled things, form words from noise and speak my fill of truth.

leon

my father sacrificed my mother to the devil when i was born skin me alive and you will see her bones inside  i used to say “i’m sorry” with every heartbeat i cried my apologies to my dreams but the road spoke my name and i set my bare feet in the dust and did not apologize to the world for the soft round moons of my hips how i liked to dance fast and dizzy for devouring tender touch like a starved man for swearing under my breath when i prayed to mary each night. i got lost in this city, far from my mountains, far from my garden from the dirt i had mixed, the plants who grew up under my songs my mother lies inside my bones and when i cannot sleep for loneliness i feel her in my soul’s outline and i no longer need a home.

Burnish it again, that tarnished mirror we used to look in and see two faces, one. It was never in our features each alone, but sums greater than addends, that we were bound. Cherish, as I have, I do, the youness of me, the me in you. And let us be our best, for better and for worse.