The sun inhales deep, swims down, down to us through a drowned world of trees, still our guardian angels, bright fish dart among them, impersonating song birds, the children are not safe here anymore
As ordinary men huddle and cast lots
for the seamless robe of
God
We ask liturgical questions, why must the dead pretend they are anything else, here in the depths of the world where we have waited so long? We resemble our former selves, only shadows now, constructing chalk outlines of the world which has gone on without us
When he breaks through we watch in awe, chalk outlined arms raised, like children who must be helped into
The clothing of this beautiful
Hereafter
Methuselah lived 969 years, which means that at just over 100, my grandfather was a spring chicken, as lifespans go. That notwithstanding he got a lot done. Married, participated in at least three wars, fathered children, buried some. Lost a wife, found another, called me his oldest unmarried granddaughter for as long as it applied.
I loved him in all his iterations, in all his familiar imperfections, but I know Someone who loves him more.
The One who is the Road
The All and Only
Road Home.
Psalm 116
I have known for some time that using the clipped, incisive, deliberate forms associated with poetry was one way to write about the devastation caused by my adopted son.
I started writing the poetry publicly when the prose seemed too difficult for people.
You could call this the “it’s too awful” syndrome, or you could call it the complicity principle. People either do not want to face the devastation and intimacy of sexual assault or they have their own story and do not really want to scrutinize how their story was handled. Notice the passive tense–change the passive tense–how they handled their story.
We have debilitating and unwarranted stigmata which we apply to the victims of sexual assault in a highly prejudicial and unscientific fashion.
All cases of sexual assault are woefully underreported, yet we claim to understand rape victims.
You cannot have a principled, scientific understanding of a condition if you force the sufferers of the condition into silence.
Nor can you ever separate the “symptoms” of victimhood out from the original crime or the subsequent, devastating consequences of enforced silence.
Every victim of a crime deserves relief, but in rape, the victim often faces subsequent harm.
They are told to be quiet or they will be marginalized.
That marginalization never stops. It can happen any time a victim shares their story.
I know because I just watched it happen again, and again, and again when my daughter wrote her college entrance essay on her rape story.
We are collectively surprised at how ephemeral the boat is, balloonish, easily punctured. As are we. I wonder if the others have drawn the same conclusions-we have become ghosts in our erstwhile stories, still haunted by the house, by the spouse, by the hope we left behind.
Only Lazarus whistles a chipper tune. Why is he so happy? Because nothing is a cool hand to lose.
I bought a boat in the hill country, she says to herself,
In this place where the Sky always becomes an ocean
We have lost so much, but I will have this beat-up John boat, recompense for years ago when I
Told you, leave your anger and walk home from here
As though we all don’t have to do that
As though there is any other way for stone-cold prodigals to
come home
It is just an email for something fun for the kids, but it reminds me of my former squalor, the way you might try to love someone who treats you like the bars, the cage, the meal set before them.
I could tell you all the symptoms and all the chaos, I could tell you the inadequate advice, the befuddlement of friends, the tragedies of children, or the strange calm caused by heavy psychotropic drugs, doctor’s office fish, surely unaware of the storm of a girl in this office by the sea.
I wake up from nightmares feeling that way again–mornings of dread, a low-grade fear of all our tomorrows.
What will become of them? Children without possessive pronouns
To guide them home.
Anger is a strong drink in the deep watches of the night. I have kept all the words, all the words for sorrow, loss, and the island, but there are children in the sun swept piazza, bell-less bell tower, and the sheltered colonnade perfect for freeze tag, as the sun goes down, beautiful ring-leader
conspiring to keep you will always be so different than conspiring to
Let you go.
We go out
Into the yard
Catch light in butterfly nets
Unspool the hammocks
Which then become sails
Lifted by the wind
Which as you know (already)
Goes where it wills
He moves up the wall quickly, ascending over three thousand vertical feet in a little over 3 hours. We all marvel at him, as well we should, that kind of hubris and fearlessness is an altar to the human spirit
Who fails to see the God who held him there
All along
I go back to Alex’s choosing the rocks over the ladies
As I count days and hours and minutes and seconds
A slow hunger crawl
All fat girl dependence not on
Finger strength and will power but the dorsal strength of a lullaby–
Carrying Light 