Category Archives: grief

Real Mom

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i wrote it deliberately 

the way it has been now to me

for over 20 years

and has been to the created

Universe

For as long as He can remember

Or rather just since that unfortunate incident in the Garden

“Biological mother” might have always been our deplorable undoing-

The willful choice

To pick death over Real Mom

Seems somewhat abstruse and vaguely epistemological 

Until I tell you about the feral 

cats of Universal City

one of whom, just a wee thing

had words with me last night

Sure, they were just 

plaintive and insistent 

Mewings in the parking lot

But we both know it was more than that

It was all of them

Hidden in the margins

Rightfully afraid of the humans who trashed the Garden

Looking for Real Mom

And yet so cold, so alone

so afraid to come home.

Lost girl

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it is the details you wish

To unhear, unread, undo

the window into terrible

Opened by her own

biological mother 

Who then had the wherewithal to

Shower

After she had baptized the child

The spun-glass-irretrievable little girl

In pain and blood 

When she should have plaited

Flowers in her hair.

Modern Ghost

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at the edge of the edge of the silver dance 

the stuff of space becomes so attenuated that

a single floating atom

cannot see the ghost mama

(because there is, by definition, nothing there)

Yet she is.

Curled around her lone, fetal darling

So much smaller than a human

blastocyst 

Just a nucleus, protons, the usual electrons 

Would be panicky lonely

Except for the unseen but still 

so present 

Modern ghost.

Sunshine

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having lost the ancient word for fire, underestimate it into neat concentric squares folded, shelved and forgotten next to ugly Christmas sweaters, baby pictures, and odd clay art projects of now-adult progeny

Neglect means nothing to it, coiled, implacable, unfazed by short and mortal attention spans

Let the last leaf fall but…

Do not neglect the sun

Content for now to burn

At a safe distance

Until the day it will unhinge from invisible moorings and float

Balloon-like Beauty towards us

Suddenly, immaculately attentive

To this nakedness before impending fire.


Everyday Christmas

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Crowded city, lonely manger

Tired little mama so close 

to the house of bread

You tell me the story of

tokens we substitute for transubstantiation 

Exchanging trinkets for the

Stuff of life (everlasting)

or looking for the little clues-

“The ones who still hold on”

So very far from home

He knows you

try to pull a fast one

Child with the big words

In his eyes

Calls your bluff

I know you love Christmas!

Light is no ordinary word when spoken 

In the dark

Commanding songs of rescue from the sleep-deprived

Who ponder why

Gold…frankincense…myrrh

gifts for the

Master-builder

Who makes a transom from a cross.

Empty Your Pockets

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What we saw was 

the pudgy placeholder for the law

In his uniform, high alert

gun drawn at the suspects

Through the bullhorn they hear the same grim warnings:

Put your hands up

Don’t turn around

Walk  slowly to me

Pantomime of imminent demise 

The laws of physics make the same demands:

Put your hands up…don’t turn around…walk slowly to

The pantomime of imminent demise

Twenty years ago the doctors never read me

The Miranda Rights of motherhood

About the presence or absence of DNA

Arms, feet, a face on the ultrasound they never let me see

Swimming in the dark

Pebbles with new names

Ask God for answers

Hands up…don’t turn around…walk back…

Was this child real enough?

He prophesies 

children from stones

Not unlike dragon teeth

Heart pierced through

So we can all come home

By nightfall.

Fixed Points of Light

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I squint to the horizon of “us”

To see you

gazing each day at

The thumbprints of eternity

Finding  only

autonomic dopplering

Morse code for G-O-D

While I, all dervish need

Lean my head against

His broken chest 

Hear the beating heart of God

Shout so loud

A pitchy song of adoration 

At the center of this

Expanding infinite:

Skies, scars, planets, constellations,

Pulsars, telemetry, metonymy

All portmanteaus for

Leaves in early winter shook loose from the hair of the mother tree

lighthouses fixed to a rocky shore 

Amidst inkwell seas

We bob in the dark

Fixed points of light

Crayoned Heaven

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think of the worst book

Each page, each word, each sentence 

Awful for a long time until

They are re-written

With the simple line drawings of a child

Obscuring words and pictures of 

darkness, evil, or moldy and stained 

garden-varietal venality

With the loveliest trees

Birds in flight /charcoaled nimbi

Outlined halos

Their feathery heads tilted

Ever-so-slightly-quizzical

Asking why are you sad?

Each page of darkness 

Transformed by this

Ferociously tender

Child-

Light, where there used to be all those

Terrible monsters

Crayoned over/ into heaven

By this poet-redeemer

word spoke to life.

The Lost Cause

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I looked it up,

The thing about rainbows…when none are in sight

What do you do with a fallen, broken

Rain-drenched world?

Ignore the indirect saturation of light (filtered through heavy 

Clouds)

Put ineluctable 

Signs in the sky

Sometimes vivid, others spiraling, concentric

Insinuated into ordinary

Sunsets

Sure, I got it–rainbows

The unfortunate companions of unicorns

Neither make the boat…

Or as I prefer to think–both

The misunderstood rhino

The glinting prismatic light 

Or more importantly–James Baldwin, evoking

Saint Peter…

Fire the next time

His anger, his dungeon, his elegant use of fire

As both a noun and a verb

I can barely look straight at

That kind of righteous rage

Much less the real

God

Who raises a Son

To rudder, anchor, mast, and sail

The one and only vessel

Which could

Will

Has

Sailed the sea of fire…

the next time.


Break my bones

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middle page of something 

My words to you 

unnailed, unpierced, still love

Disconnect.  Disconnect 

these broken 

Bones, sinews, ligaments 

Teeth and bones become 

Rebellious things in the house

Unknit, unswept, unmade

Until…

what is left?

When I cannot walk to you, run to you 

Reach the limit of the horizon 

Lie awake old

Teeth, old bones 

Grind out hours in the dark 

wondering where was

Ezekiel’s army beneath

integumentary sand

Old bones 

No longer insanguinate

They lie down, sleep children cuddled beneath

The coverlet of 

God singing His 

Bruising love song

Lullaby in the place of the skull

Has, is, will

Sing to the dead

Broke-bone army

Spoke to life

Grip the blade,

Fit to fight