today it was teeth.
teeth and sunshine
teeth and mountains
teeth and where all the rivers run
teeth and the names of famous men
teeth and meat-eaters
Baby teeth.
Teeth in the mouths of ordinary women…these two, for example–
Quite beautiful, eating midnight food together, their voices lift and carry
Down the corridors
of night
A wide-awake, lumbering thing
Moving fast, rushing past
Keeping watch…
with teeth.
The dog from Corpus Christi appears bemused
by the still-falling snow
Cold to the paw and to the scruff
he shakes his mane as if to say directly
This is no fun
No warmth in the cold, in the dark
as the boy worries about the man outside
Trudging through the storm
I know this: we cannot save ourselves
We have rifled through both fervent prayers and familiar hymns
The angel appears
Driving a jeep through the dark
Willing to detour for us
Make salvific suggestions apologetically
As though we could ignore our perilous need for rescue
Push us up the hill and tell us the direction home
As snow falls all night on the mountain
We hold each answered prayer
snowflakes in our hands
Just like the confusion over light years-
Unit of time? Unit of distance?
Grief is more than ordinary synonyms
Loss, sorrow, mourning.
No, grief is a place you go sometimes
Sorta like a cruise or a bus tour, I guess
Or trip to a fancy casino
Only of course all the slot machines are empty and
You have no stomach for the buffet.
At first you think
This trip will never end
But it starts to let up after
A very long time
Then, just when you thought you were home
Safe, with your bunny slippers on,
You fish up
Back on that dammed boat, that bankrupt resort
And somehow your inability to escape this
All expenses paid vacation
Makes you weep, weep in the weird soulless light
Of this world of broken pronouns
Standing in for faces in a picture, once so vivid alive
Before the fall…before all the terrible falls
Crash into light years.
What if losing you
were like nothing so much as
watching a child throw
an erstwhile boomerang
into a once-drowned field?
Even with the approximate knowledge of descent, I pace,
Shift aside the long grace
..shift aside the long grass…with my feet
Look for signs of you-markings like the body of
a coiled snake
Glint of color, perhaps
but you are lost out there
Needle-in-a-hay-field
And I tell them things to tell myself
You are not a boomerang
Even a boomerang is not always
a boomerang (when it fails to return across the field)
Oh darling
Come back to me
in the end.
Imagine the mountains
you would move to save
The one you loved
then switch
to the hills you might shift
for someone you were
merely fond of
then calculate the dirt
in disheveled piles
you might consider
scooping here to there
for a stranger
then last of all take this into account:
all real love stories are also physics problems
Either stones rolled in place over deliberate tombs
or somehow, miraculously
Rolled away.
they say her dress
obscured her face when they found her in the river
he as young as his eventual wife would be
when she went from girl to muse
muse is a tricky thing, Child
who never was a pipe
I inventory both the cause and the cure for addiction
The need, the proper remedy, the clouds white amidst blue in the cup of your head
Chose a different slumber
Not opioid, not heroin, not poison in the fruit or spindle, not locked in a room, not guarded by dragon
Medicinal sleep
Antiseptic reset, white coats, gently beeping monitors
Let the girl rest
Let her own dreams fell the dragon
So that when the spell is broken
The clouds and sky will spill out over her
Beautiful, fragile babies
what if this is the real world?
what if you are the ghost?
what if it is your own child
you see in the sudden picture
on the other side of the scrim
Holding
worlds both together and apart
You do the math when
you see her–how old she
was, is, will be
If she makes it that far
Refrain in your head thudding
like fists on plate glass
because you are the ghost
voice thin and impossible
just the other side of glass
as you watch her slowly
slip away.
Knowing how uncomfortable you get when I jaw on about the abuse issue, I have decided to redact it for you, using a host of hip and bipartisan global and political crises in place of all the words for felonies against children.
So here’s the story. Redacted for your comfort, of course-
When we were still young we fostered then adopted two children who were already diagnosed with global warming and national debt by the time we met them.
In fact, they had so many problems they had already fired dozens of US attorneys as was customary at the beginning of a new administration.
We were told to be consistent and disciplined. We were told this would help…
Perhaps it did. Could what they did have been worse? Pacific-Ocean-vortex-of-trash worse?
Maybe.
But as it happened, when their younger siblings were still quite young, Charles DOB 2/17/94, was caught Ponzi-scheming and coyoting his little sisters. For years-quite systematically -in the places ordinary people went to push down their risk of type 2 diabetes-football stadium, tennis court, high school pole-vault mat.
He had taught the little ones expensive border walls were necessary to keep bad hombres out.
Only as it turned out, he was the baddest of the hombres.
He taught them universal health care with a single payer system would bankrupt them while at the same time using the machinations of federal agencies (such as the IRS) to bully or intimidate them into keeping quiet.
He bussed technically deceased persons across county lines to vote for the candidate of his choice (him, unsurprisingly).
More victims than fingers on his own pale, freckled, meaty hands.
Until one day, way too late, he was caught, and the truth all came tumbling out–
The lies
The bleached coral reefs
Lost, extinct, and endangered species
Poor afflicted pollinators
Thick winter smog trapped in Alpine valleys and obscuring Beijing’s winter sun
Our staggering national debt…
All under the foolish, trusting, naive noses of his legal guardians, people who had mostly always believed in the electoral college. Believed in a bicameral congress, Founding Fathers, and law-and-order presidents.
The aftermath was crippling. The survivors found themselves in the usual need for puppies, s’mores, and a celebrity rant or two (at an award ceremony here or there).
Instead they went to court, called elected officials, petitioned the government, and wrote about it.
Only to find that all those used plastic toothbrushes swirling in the sea can really make a nice person nervous. As if all that swirling detritus far out to sea were a contagious kind of broken.
Our kind of broken–redacted, parochial, muted somehow.
Placeholders for tragedy.
somewhere in the bowels of the NIH there are tiny, fragile pig-children
Spun from the DNA of “us” and “them”
Which reminds me of a story—
Once there were these two guys
Who let iterations and outlines of darkness
Into every corner of their very own souls
(Whatever that is, right?)
Only to find their place among the dead
Until…
Love walked in
Dispelled the ghosts of men into the
Real and understandably alarmed
Sea of pigs
Who then chose death over the dark wraiths of men
Sometimes I ask myself
What happened to those panicked pigs?
Did they find the eternal?
And what about these new unconsenting
children of a lonely room
Half-pig, half-child
Will they be allowed to
Escape the grave
And, with no help from their human side
Find rest for their weary souls
i fish it out of the no-man’s land
beneath the back-back seat
momentarily mistake it for detritus
before realizing
it is the smallest boat in the world
dime-sized fighting ship
speculate about the shipbuilder
know the whole
time the real problem
yet to be addressed-
was it always this small?
life’s work of tiny men?
or was it once a real boat
whittled down to this diminution
by years and years of sturm and drang
in this teacup full of sea.
Elealee's Blog 