We talk short words
The argot of binary code
Words and symbols you know better than me
Girlchild
My other daughter
Wish I could keep you close
Through storms and sun and boredom
All the days
A reminder of things
Beyond my reach
We talk short words
The argot of binary code
Words and symbols you know better than me
Girlchild
My other daughter
Wish I could keep you close
Through storms and sun and boredom
All the days
A reminder of things
Beyond my reach
Light, for instance
Poured out like a drink offering
Through trees in the summer sky
Why is it following me? The boy asks
Because it loves you
His mother speaks of metonymy
And the moon?
Why does it follow me?
Same reason, of course
Love.
A woman on a plane objects to forced proximity to pornography and is told she has no support. She must endure another person’s objectional material. Which is, btw, degrading and offensive to women.
No one comes to her aid, and the NYTimes walks on egg shells when they report it.
A respectable American businessman who practices fair, nondiscriminatory hiring and follows his conscience in his business is vilified because he has the temerity to exercise his first amendment right to say he supports a traditional view of marriage.
Guy has a right to talk
But…
The truth is that one of the major reasons the marriage argument is huge and important is that millions of Americans live in fear because of hate. Hate kills, maims, tortures, intimidates, and dehumanizes people. Just because of their sexual identity.
No person in this country should have to hide who they are because they are afraid of violence.
No person should be the target of violence because they are gay or transgendered.
We have to start with that.
We have to build from the ground up.
Love requires it.
One time in the same week I wrote a letter to someone and a poem to someone else. Both someones had behaved badly. My intrepid partner (always the English major) told me he liked the poem more than the letter.
Of course, I thought. Poetry is the marble colonade you hide in when followed by ghosts or splendor. A letter is an everyday thing. Too blunt to be art. But is any of this about Art?
No. Not really. It is about sanctuary and splendor. Borrowed safety and borrowed beauty.
And attempting however obliquely to suggest the existence of Absolute Love.
So I violated my own rule about my other blog– called etiology. I told myself I would keep etiology free of my obsession with grief and injustice and the anger that follows these things.
I once wrote a poem I cannot see myself publishing. Too painful, too personal. I once wrote a letter to C’s prison therapist which simply described C’s crimes from what his victims and witnesses had said. Just the facts, as they say. The therapist read it and said he read my anger.
Anger? I thought. That was just the facts. I wonder what he would think if he saw my angry letter.
The girl tires
But I am
Wide awake
No longer because of fear
More habit, really
The veil I draw
Shrouds
my face each night
Pushing through darkness
For a glimpse of
You.
build you a fort
of sheets.quilts
blankets–
counterpanes
A Comforter Stronghold
pillow masonry
fortifying all our flying
buttresses
around this cathedral
the artisans, all children
nobody hurt there
not allowed–
the very law of love
forbids it
and all the pain
of our collective
history
would unravel like a braid each night
healing all these grievous wounds
his conversation with the devil
his last meal
the things He gathers with his hands
broken treasure
if you being evil
He asks
(rhetorically–don’t answer that…)
give your children good things
stones for bread
our history
my dear
my darling
if I could only roll
all the stones away
and find you living
Bread among the stones
bred among stones
my love…
I say
God: Space Artist
and you respond:
“Heh.
The Universe +
gravitation=
collisions
and mergers
of galaxies.”
Nice
is another word for weightless
ephemeral
and sombrero
comes for the ancient
word for shadows
and sorrow.
I see splendor in
the arc of the living
God.
you shake your head
and I am inclined to ask whether
you genuinely believe
the Pieta
is just a big rock
worn down by friction?
canst thee see Jesus?
canst thee see the creator?
Michaelangelo amidst the stars.
I have
Had dreams of swimming
Miragy things
Slippery
The pool will be closed
Or inexplicably elusive
Sometimes I resort to paddling through
The shallows
I interpret these dreams
As desire
Need
To know
That I can find
The girl who like me
Slips through
Both shallows and deeps
The silence and the call
From lacrimal waters
This happened years ago. She was very young and had a nimbus of curls. She was walking down a sidewalk holding your hand. She was clearly enjoying your company. She kept calling you “my robin.”
When I think of the ways you failed her and why you should have done more, done something–advocated for her–that is the image I see in my head. The last time I know for sure that your relationship to that little girl mattered.
At least to her.