If tragedy is a long-shot and comedy is a close-up
Then what is the Facebook shot of a young mother slumped
Out cold over the body of her own
Wailing child
On a van
On the way
To the methadone clinic?
In Plain Sight
Reply
Category Archives: Poetry
Among the Dead
just moments before the blast
There were only living
Breathing children, women, men including
one who knew the truth about the vest, the explosives
wrapped around the heart
of time about to turn
A wedding into a bouquet of broken
Body parts everywhere the survivors said
The ones who could still talk
remember the calamitous before and after
But few will acknowledge the lie at the heart
of the chest-wired-to-slaughter
-grim wedding of deadly injunctions-
You, child, whatever they promised you they had no
right to say these empty things
Imposters all scorch, blood, and bone
Before the implacable throne of the hereafter
The Speed of Darkness
you ask me these absolute questions–/No matter what? No matter what. /Or–What is the speed of darkness? /I look it up–either: /Darkness is just the complete absence of light ….so it travels at the speed of light /Or the more dire–As soon as the light is gone, darkness returns, so you could say that darkness travels faster than the speed of light /the light just a flicker in the doorway of the world /The darkness a cat ready to pounce /a sea of trouble, waiting just waiting for the light to tire or wander off /so that it (the darkness)
Can overwhelm, flood in,
Return.
The reunion of broken parts
you take it for granted–
All those exes and the whys
Algebra–the reunion of broken parts
When no one asks how they got
So broken
We must all search for that
Ancient mathematician
His ability to see how
To…
Piece us back together
Bone by bone
Until every x is solved
And every y has its
solution
Chinese Box
some stories hold
Such trauma
That in order to
Tell them
You have to use a Chinese box
What, you ask, is a Chinese box?
A Chinese box is a
Story
Within a story
Within a story
Not to be confused with
Chinese handcuffs
(Which is a very different thing indeed)
For example:
Once there were some children who lived in an apartment with their (biological) mother and father. They did not always eat. Sometimes they were left alone. The father beat the mother.
The loss was unbearable, said their foster mother. The boy was mute. The girl was cagey.
So small. So damaged. So angry.
They called her bad mommy, bad mommy, bad mommy.
Because there was only the one.
One room, one closet, one subterfuge, one million wrongs
In the circuits of his mind
He tells the story of the bad mommy, who was (he says) too much drama.
As she pieces together the past she neglects the symmetry of hearts, circles, and peanut butter sandwiches among the survivors
Because, as an ordinary prophet once said–every trauma has its own story…
Within these concentric
Chinese boxes.
Topiary Angels
the trees are animate
Watching over
Us
Towering water fowl and prehistoric raptors
They have been
Put.
Under.
A.
Spell.
For millennia
Slowed down so that
They must rely on outside actors to
Shake them free–
The wind or
Small children shimmying skyward
Begin to give voice, lend
momentary quickness
To these beauties
Tied to the wet, dark earth
Searching for treasure
So carefully, so slowly
Through the roots
Waiting for the Day
When we will all be
Set free.
Reflect the sky
some things remain dark
Obsidian dark
No matter how much you try to put distance between
The two of us
The video footage cannot, will not excise your presence
Obsidian dark
Is not your chicken-scratch handwriting
The horrible story I made you write down
Or the things you left out…
That so many people helped to…diminish
None more than you
The damage which will always be
dead dog on my chest
Ghosts of dogs should haunt us both
But let yours bark incessantly outside the grainy film of your transgressions
While mine
Returns whole, resurrected even,
To the cement driveway by the old house where the children played with the water hose and the blue plastic wading pool
Joy
They fill the screen with joy
For a moment even you could see
The way the thinnest layer of water poured out on rough cement
Reflects the sky
Reflects the light from the endless sky
Reflects the glory of this endless day we
…walk toward the sun, my one-time-child
Before the night
Falls forever
A.D.
you must believe in
The invisible world–
Atoms, neutrons, quarks
And other molecular angels
These bits of light and matter
Swirl around us
Halos of an inevitable world
You bend to kiss his brow
No longer visible with naked eye.
But what of the others?
There to receive him
Just beyond the scrim
Clouds of witnesses
The insubstantial irreplaceable
Eternal us
Funny how often Lincoln shows up in our
Iterations of heaven
And how young grandma always looks
As though you and I could
Stand the light
Ten million stars are just
This single flickering candle in
A fleck of night
He dusts off his shoulder,
Strong right arm
Gathers our once-mortal hearts
Into immortal, imperishable we
We who will stand
Candidates for this eternal
Song sung loud
By our six year old selves
Forever
Stillness
stay in the box
All cardboard and glue
The bars you have hewn with your fingernails
Purely arbitrary
But wait still
Look for the way the open spaces
Casts shadows
Train your ears for approaching
Footsteps that
Do not come
You will be alone with the voice in your head
Telling you be still
And know that I am God.
Vorkuta
halo
One hundred miles above the
Arctic circle
So cold the sun
Will fail to even graze
Skin of men bound in iron and chains
Click of light and dark, tracks and ties
Train.
To a string of gulags
Resembling nothing less than
Rough pearls
Which are surely
The opposite of coal
Torn from the frozen chest
By men whose bone-deep desperation
mix with their fear
As air bleeds out
We all dream of
of fire
Archangel
So far beneath the buried heart
Of this vertiginous stone
Planet
Carrying Light 