When I first saw Finding Nemo it was so much about you.
And after all these years, Finding Dory is much the same.
I may have been your brief and most arbitrary mama, but I will love you forever.
And your foster dad and I will never stop laying down the shells…not just for your way back to us, but as a mosaic for how you changed us forever.
You, beautiful girl.
I love them when they snake totemistically through the clouds, smoke before the storm
And when they are filigree-perfect by the pool, along the slender branches of new trees
Skin the same green as the leaves
But when it is the serpent
Climbing vertically toward the sparrowlets,
I cannot either
Turn, ignore
Or observe with the objective skill of a naturalist
intervene
Knowing grace is more than words before a meal
Or a sticker you wear to church on your lapel
Grace is the Hand that
saves the sparrow
Even at the mortal expense
Of the dragon.
by then their civilization had evolved to ruthless efficiency
Injustice and oppression had been outsourced to less developed countries
Leaving them only to
Eradicate grief
They tried all the usual suspects–
Hot tea, warm milk, kittens
Yet the mothers still grieved
So “They”
Invited the white coats to come
Put their heads together,
build the perfect
Comfort machine.
It worked of course, they were prone not to failure
As they stood at the scene of each tragedy
Bystanders on the side
…the Comfort Machine churned out its magic
Combed out the violence
scrubbed the murder
Bleached out the violation
Unthreaded both deceit and apathy
Established a perimeter of fire
Around self-preservation
Passed a final round of shots
Among the dignitaries-
Bone bourbon, tequila, absinthe
They murmured in approval the way a barkeep might shout
Last call
As the music continued to pulse hard and fast through the crowd
Everyone turned
To the mothers for some final sign it had worked
As the Comfort Machine idled and purred
Over the still deafening sound
Of silenced hearts
they said they lost them
Tossed in the trash?
Recycled?
Whatever
I see them clearly
The shape of ordinary Syro-Phoenician
Cursed on lined paper
Wtf.
How do you lose
The story of the rape of children
In parking lots
Playgrounds
Public spaces as well as cannibalizing
The geography of “playing house” and “family?”
You should know that the state of f#cking Texas
Can “lose” the words we wrote
All they want
But the story belongs forever
To the indelible
Victims’ statements.
in my head
I sing off-key
Pick through the rocks
On the steep uphill
Dark of course
Avoid the fruit
They say
I long to look
Behind me
Willing you be there still
As though a woman of no particular gifts
Could summon the missing
With scraps of broken notes
Strung together
After so long waiting
Wild hope
quietly emerges from the crowd
Some unnamed Jewish festival in Jerusalem
Near the Sheep Gate, of course
Where we
Lame, blind, and patently foolish
Lie prone, waiting for angels
Angels and the ghosts of gods
Occasionally
stir the waters
Every plural word written of
our collective loss
Reruns the ambiguity between
Our healing and our disgrace
Clouds in our eyes
We fail to
Drink such strong medicine
Poured out
For us
these ordinary words
Hewn from a tree
To the curve of the foot
Or simply endure
Itself a stone, a hard place
To be in the presence of God
As he dips the bread into wine
Supper of blood and agony
Last…
Supper
Day
Glimpse…
Of who we will be
The first and the last
The last shall be
First.
First you must know
The beautiful feat of God.
It has been almost a decade since my father died after his helicopter crashed on descent.
I still feel flashes of pain when I am reminded of that pain.
Ordinary haunting is a longterm normal for we who grieve.
The death of one man changes the world.
Evoking Jesus.
He took every crash, every act of misery and self-destruction. Drained the cup of history to the dregs of genocide, exploitation, war, famine, epidemic, deadly contagion.
Hell to pay for us. The wrath of holy Love, the grief of God poured out.
For us.
To atone for the transgressions of a single garden-variety human would be unwatchable, unlivable, unthinkable, unbearable– awful.
The ransom for all our billions is so beyond reckoning, we do not try.
But we should.
We should at least reckon the cost and the pain, fear, horror and brutality it took to redeem our ordinary wrongs-gluttony, lust, prejudice, and greed.
We should; we shall.
We will either be defined now by our debt to this Eternal Savior or we will be defined forever by the life we squandered at his great cost.
the car crash in slow motion
The snake coiled to strike the child
The mother seeing bad news
In the doctor’s eyes
Some moments are so unforgettably awful
The spirit rises out
Of the body, off to one side
Hovers over the disaster
Snapping shots of all the carnage
A heart just beginning to break
Operates differently than
One far gone into the cave of grief
the last evening you were mine
Was the first time you met
Your new mommy, new daddy
Strangers then
You were delivered back to me
Sleeping I sat with you in my arms
Time folded around us
Everything paused
For our unlikely pieta
I had just enough sense
to stop everything
just to be with you
A little longer
forgive me for that day in September when I wrapped you in a Mao-green papoose
Indescribable light
I understand we are only metaphors
Allegories
Parables
For feral mother love
Howl at the moon
Stalk the night forest
Accost the brothers Grimm
With the spindle-pierced grief
Through sinew and heart
I held on as long as I could
Then looked for you on each horizon
She-wolf helpless
Caught in the trap
Of human law
Carrying Light 