on the day I tell my daughter it is
mourning dove with a “u”
I remember you are gone
And count the things I used to say
About your father, your brothers
All named the same
(Like all those George Formans)
I still do not
Know which fight you lost
Left to
Cut through the jungle path
To the sea, to the sea serpent country
where we were young
all together.
Last spring I sheared my own crown, playing both the sheep and the shepherd in a one-woman show about redemption.
The thing is:
You can’t redeem yourself, no matter what lovely poetic last
Name you have been given.
I see the boy you used to be
I see the lost in your eyes
Playing both sheep and shepherd in your own one-man show about…
I will always love you.
Who says that and means it?
Not me. I am a coward who cannot handle her always
Ten years since he died
And I stand in the dollar store conjuring up themes for a party girl
Bikini contestant party girl
Written in permanent marker
The lost in their eyes, the voice in my head
Man who played both the sheep and the
Shepherd in his own one-man redemption show
Thorns for crowns/ Paper crowns/diadems, tiaras
For the children we will be
At the wedding feast of the Lamb.
Tell the inhabitants of this broke-down place
new sheriff in town…
who so resembles the
wise child posed
Years ago in a picture
Beneath this ink-blue-night-sky sombrero,
Clark Gable mustache, glint of forever in your eyes
As this endless tide rakes an uneven shore
As words fail to form the adequate cup for sorrow
You go on-
Unstoppable heart.
Boy with the unstoppable
Heart.
So close
to a reclusive keeper
of memories, of wrongs
Shuffling among the forgotten objects
Placeholders for the barely living:
anonymous empty
water bottles, hollow and crumpled
Become the jury
Old newspapers still swaddled in
Their plastic rain protectors
Told to be
Witnesses or spectators
Instructed to rise
As a one-armed nutcracker assumes the bench
Rag doll court reporter records the proceedings
Mr. Vinegar prosecutes while
the defense attorney was appointed from among the
A pantheon of generic
Happy Meal toys.
But the victims are living songbirds
Twittering in the disheveled
cage of my heart of course
Always re-animating dried bones-
Off-kilter, neglected, wrongs
Will inexorably be
Radically, fundamentally transformed
When the true King
Calls them back
To life
in the space of no more than
Half-an-hour
someone steals his little shoes
dear to him/dear to us
Still, just shoes.
At the scene of the crime we
Call their names
Thinking whoever did this has to love them
Must have loved them
Oh. This song I know the words by heart
Sang it all those years ago
With all the other sodden
Unbearable
Break up songs for babies.
somewhere floating in the ether of souls there is
another us
Without the inevitable entrapment of self-preservation
-The pig mom and the human child
I use my truncated vocal apparatus
to try to warn you you are
– not safe here
among the scientists
With their crisp white coats and syllogistic rejoinders
They count pieces of us
Placing animal in one
category
and the human in another
Bone-bone-bone-
Spleen-heart-cornea-
Never question whether we can
see color or
Feel pain
Confined instead to
Diminished souls jarred by
All the words for
monster
She folds the old court room,
kangaroo judge, too-
chatty DA,
disembodied victim’s advocate
Into a single square of
pressed paper
Mama’s voice cracks over the
willful substitution
rendering mandatory sentences into a
Chain of paper doll victims
flattened easily
Into origami anger
….funny hats to
fragile sodden boats
hit by each percussive wave of
Shouldn’t-‘ve-been
Shouldn’t-ever-have-been
Done-to-us folds
after almost exactly 30 years
I return to the original cone of silence
Scooped not by time and chance but the
Actual-true-hand of God
near the plain of Megiddo
where bad, terrible, awful things have, did, and will
Happen.
You have a tell, my dear
In all your smack talk about leprechauns and canine destinations for women
At 2:30 in the morning
the aircraft flies too loud, too close
to my insomnia
I remember your anger is your origami armor
against the wounded you-us-story
sewn into the cloak
of every disguise you put on
in vain.
your birthday falls
between the Ides of February and
pruning day for roses
when the master gardener
makes them sound so alive, so fragile, so human
the way you once were
Boy without words for the monsters
we all become without the Antidote
without the blood transfusion
without the interventionist God
Who somehow, ineluctably abides
this fallen terrible
world where children, babies even
grow up thinking both antichrist and apocalypse are normal
Whole time grown ups
Just shout the most destructive platitudes
into the shotgun corridor of
This unbearable
desolation.
ghost light
reflected in the rear view mirror
(Where, as you know, things are closer than they appear)
Come close, Light
Lie with me in the dark night
Gaze into the firmament
where broody giants
time and atoms become
Lonely
As our eyes begin to falter
the ghost light does not
stop just because we fail
to see
No. The light goes on
comes on
Barrelling through the tunnel of darkness
toward us, light speed
These three remain…
Just three? Out of this infinite
host of…the
whole we shall be..come
When we see Love for the first time
Face to face.
Carrying Light 