Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.
Calvarium 5:7,8
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Category Archives: missing person
Calvarium 5
- 2 doz. cupcakes
- Tea lights
- 2 doz lei
- 2 doz gift bags
- 12 feather boas
- 12 pirate swords
- 2 gal milk
- Birthday banner
- 2 packs juice boxes
- 5 pizzas
- 12 assorted party crowns
- 12 pink tiaras
As the children come into the party room they see the treasure box by the door overflowing with odd vests, second-hand dresses, scarves, hats, helmets, shields, tutus, capes (of course), foam swords, and they don these things, perhaps serially-changing from knight to ballerina to carpenter
Seamlessly
Because they are children
And this is their kingdom.
Calvarium 2
Old time-y barber shop, corner of a once prosperous downtown, old fellas talking about the game on cathode ray TV mounted on the wall. Men coming and going, sitting, standing, paying tips with crumpled dollar bills. So many versions of the naked pate, the scruffy, and the wispy comb-over. Knife to chin, razor to scalp, going through this mitzvah of voluntary loss as that ancient metaphorical talisman turns on its axis outside-red/white/red/white ribbons of our old, shared story of triage. Triage or else.
Cathedral in the water
I see the two hapless, arbitrary, even hypothetical plastic children’s toys descending to the depths, their lovely, efficient tunics, interchangeable hair helmets, ridged plastic arms and hands thrust out marking each fall deeper through zones of habitable waters-here, the last hint of light, here the very last marine mammal, here the beginning of cold and dark and heavy as words we have never know the way he did-“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” All because something that was always supposed to be
Real
Alive
Heavy
Has gone missing-reduced to light metaphor and toy architecture, the constant illusory ability to cup thin streams of water in human hands…I am losing you, losing you, mostly hypothetical plastic figure of a child, while at the bottom rests this drowned world–drowned streets, drowned trees, inky human figures curled in fetal positions inside this drowned
Cathedral in the water of
big infinite sea.
Could have been a song
I told myself pretend it is music after all the women’s voices are poignant, the story they tell is haunting-haunting the way a song might haunt you words very simple, sung to a child go to sleep, child, go to sleep, miles and years and day away from the moment you will remember for the rest of your life-a knock on the door-changing everything.
Prettier than me
When I met Tara she was prettier than me, younger than me, and in most ways far more disenfranchised than me. In fact there was just one area of our briefly conjoined Venn diagram connectedness where the power was ostensibly hers and definitely not mine: she was the real mom to a baby I loved very much. In that (I had been told by at least 2 lawyers) she had the legal edge. She should have been able to designate a capable guardian for her children. The law favored the biological mother. And at that time, at the end of 1998, it gave no credence to the foster mother.
A fact I can accept now, after most of the unbearable losing of Tara’s beautiful child has scarred over.
What I can’t accept is losing Tara
because…
Children of heaven
at dusk I take the bits of fortune cookies, crumbs still scattered across the messy kitchen table and…write to you, about the disposable styrofoam containers, syrupy orange sauce, tendency I have to eat my way through grief (of losing you) when…I admit you…do not need me, better that way, my trenchant sentenceless phrasing, my desert-wandering inertia, my messy house and muted grief all pressed into this vanilla-y cookie folded around words written by a stranger somewhere, perhaps one day there will be an algorithm for these things equal parts admonition and prophecy. Oh, prophecy, the old clothes of mortality, cast-off, superfluous from the beginning to
the children of heaven.
The Countries I Have Lost
A country, just like a single old-left-foot-house-slipper can be metonymous. This-for that, quid-pro-quo, how-did-I-ever-lose-you?-metonymous. Hit me at 2 am, sharp intake of breath too hard to connect it all with proper punctuation metonymous. I once accidentally cut your hand in a car window metonymous. When I met you I thought you were the crazy one metonymous. Lost in Pittsburgh a million years ago metonymous. With you the reason for years of silence had to be different metonymous.
The countries I have lost all have proper names, stable addresses, no missing slippers. Us-and-them, before-and-after countries cheerfully conventional, intentionally respectful, naturally leery of the once-familiar mendicant whose metonymic wholes have been for good or ill
Irrevocably set free.
Mum’s Day 1998
they will say focus on the positive they will say at least you gave her a good beginning they will say we have 25 families waiting, better than you like this is some kind of beauty pageant for adoptive families?
…which was a weird lie of sorts…maybe there were 25 families …maybe 5000…in the end it was only necessary to know that it was never about the hypothetical 25, always about the avaricious pair, or pairs, -on-the-ark-come-two-by-two pairs of caseworkers, pairs of administrators, pairs of lawyers, pairs of accountants, coupling, uncoupling back and forth around a central lie, a few broken laws, and Entropy, the Mother-god, chained to the loss chained to the chaos of the loss…of her babies.
This Lovely
I have never told any of them I can see you
You standing in the corner
You deprived of the…nice guy/cute kids
…chance to believe
I will never be…
good enough for your oppa
Long hair, pale skin, face as beautiful as lost place, younger sister
This lovely
Ghost in the room
of us.
Carrying Light 