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.
After giving the human mothers ample time to choose
The-would-be-has-been-will-be-stone-mover turned to this sea of
quiet rocks
Paced among them
Raised his arms wide
And spoke words of life over them-
Sing, cry, stomp, holler, embargo, resist, advocate, articulate…raise
these your newborn voices
for all these
very little girls
curled without defense-
half-a-billion muted, crucial
Question marks
as each loses
one simple, brutal
Round of rock-paper-scissors
in this place we have marked “private”
then left alone.
After the 911 call, the sirens, the knocked-in door. After the 2-for-1 autopsy, the souping-out of ballistic shards in layers of mother, curls of child. After the sewing up, the tissue samples, temporary storage in this antiseptic place.
After this near-final totem of mother-and-child.
the cool and empty morgue fills with an emanation of light, softly cupped voices, perfumed flurry, fairy godmothers. A little late she thought as they scooped and coddled the baby-little late she thought as they lifted her from the crook of each bent elbow, inexplicably washed and free of blood. Here child, they murmur, try on this, try on that. Blur of organza and tulle.
After the day she’s had she goes along with all the fuss. Come on, child, carriage is waiting!
And there they all are bippity, boppity, boop! Apartment lot for courtyard, uncajolable vermin with no intention of donning livery or pulling pumpkins. No signs of princes.
Unfazed she realizes that even here, in the weird, magic-less limbo yonder, even here the grownups believe in magical fairytales..
which still end up
doing no good for the real girls
Living then dying
Alone.
once there was a real girl
who (lucky for her)
Lived in a city with superhero dolphins
So when the humans she lived with began to
Bruise bones beneath skin
Pull out hair
Leave signs of trauma on shared walls
Well.. the
The magic dolphins of San Antonio
leapt to action!
Circled the child
Nudged her to safety
with their silvery, bottle-shaped snouts
Clicked and nodded their unequivocal attention to all
The days of her distress
Used their shear numbers to buoy her up
Brought her
bits of fish and garlands of seaweed
And in an unanimous decision
Ferried her to their own
blue, cool comparatively safe
Under-water-kingdom
far from the
city where these human mothers had
Failed her
today it was teeth.
teeth and sunshine
teeth and mountains
teeth and where all the rivers run
teeth and the names of famous men
teeth and meat-eaters
Baby teeth.
Teeth in the mouths of ordinary women…these two, for example–
Quite beautiful, eating midnight food together, their voices lift and carry
Down the corridors
of night
A wide-awake, lumbering thing
Moving fast, rushing past
Keeping watch…
with teeth.
The dog from Corpus Christi appears bemused
by the still-falling snow
Cold to the paw and to the scruff
he shakes his mane as if to say directly
This is no fun
No warmth in the cold, in the dark
as the boy worries about the man outside
Trudging through the storm
I know this: we cannot save ourselves
We have rifled through both fervent prayers and familiar hymns
The angel appears
Driving a jeep through the dark
Willing to detour for us
Make salvific suggestions apologetically
As though we could ignore our perilous need for rescue
Push us up the hill and tell us the direction home
As snow falls all night on the mountain
We hold each answered prayer
snowflakes in our hands
Just like the confusion over light years-
Unit of time? Unit of distance?
Grief is more than ordinary synonyms
Loss, sorrow, mourning.
No, grief is a place you go sometimes
Sorta like a cruise or a bus tour, I guess
Or trip to a fancy casino
Only of course all the slot machines are empty and
You have no stomach for the buffet.
At first you think
This trip will never end
But it starts to let up after
A very long time
Then, just when you thought you were home
Safe, with your bunny slippers on,
You fish up
Back on that dammed boat, that bankrupt resort
And somehow your inability to escape this
All expenses paid vacation
Makes you weep, weep in the weird soulless light
Of this world of broken pronouns
Standing in for faces in a picture, once so vivid alive
Before the fall…before all the terrible falls
Crash into light years.
What if losing you
were like nothing so much as
watching a child throw
an erstwhile boomerang
into a once-drowned field?
Even with the approximate knowledge of descent, I pace,
Shift aside the long grace
..shift aside the long grass…with my feet
Look for signs of you-markings like the body of
a coiled snake
Glint of color, perhaps
but you are lost out there
Needle-in-a-hay-field
And I tell them things to tell myself
You are not a boomerang
Even a boomerang is not always
a boomerang (when it fails to return across the field)
Oh darling
Come back to me
in the end.
Imagine the mountains
you would move to save
The one you loved
then switch
to the hills you might shift
for someone you were
merely fond of
then calculate the dirt
in disheveled piles
you might consider
scooping here to there
for a stranger
then last of all take this into account:
all real love stories are also physics problems
Either stones rolled in place over deliberate tombs
or somehow, miraculously
Rolled away.
Carrying Light 