What if they were like
Objects?
That you could touch with your hands?
Wipe a counter or a brow with Love?
Or spread an ermine Mercy
Over the body
Of a sleeping child?
What if anger had a bifurcated
Tongue
Lighting
Either chaff
Or
Home on fire
What word?
What ordinary word?
Would stop the fire
Speak peace to the wind
And rebuke
The dogs of loss
Shelter
Just a roof and walls around us
Won’t define us
Won’t be
Nothing but a house
Kept me safe
I thought
Kept us all
Safe
I thought
Wrong
Wolf don’t give no warning
Just blow the walls down
Just a house
Not my soul
Mercy take my soul
When the wind come through
Us all
Carry us
Home
Is crying
I would bottle her grief
If I could
Bury it
No.
But it would bloom
Pour it out
Like a drink offering
Like a grief offering
Like a broken
Bottle
Alabaster keepsake
Dowry, maybe
For a child, a baby
Stolen
From our memory
Of happiness
And its careful
Lie- constructed
Illusion
Stalks us
Like a cat
Or a griffin, perhaps
A gargoyle poised
On each vaulted and crumbling
Precipice
A reminding presence
Of the hstory
Constructed in tiny pieces
Of loss
I trace the veins
Once mined
Once quarried
Hewn from the ancient
Stone
Who would have known
Stone
Could be fragile
Indelibly etched
Like a lover’
s face
Lines traced
With the tips of my fingers
map a course across the rock/across the polished surface
That separates
You from me
Like myth from the living
Truth
once wrote
about
a counterpane
of fish
living
fish–
a dream
breathed into life by a
quilter
and a Man
who says
I will make you
fishers
of men
all these years later
I walk all the edges
of another woman’s storm
the signal tracks
from the
coast of Texas
all the way to the Pacific
crossing fast
too fast
toward winter…
Australia?
can you be there?
already?
that is what I would think if I were your mother
I would search the shore,
each map
the satellite
dropped pins
and the faces of
friends and strangers
for signs of my missing
son.
in hell–
oh–
the connection is poor
(a pre-paid call, of course…)
and you have to ask all
the hard questions yourself
even though the answers are
worse than
why did you do it?
and why were you angry?
and what does it mean when I know
every word between us
is
ridiculous–
the things you have taught me
in hell
full of silence
and broken pictures
a profusion of angry
words
until
the wind
rises
from the dead
to sit in a room
meant for song
and watch the women in the room
grieve so
quietly
for lost
and missing
fathers
Of leaves
Does not belong
To me
I gaze at it
For hours
Through the quiet
Window
Vigil
In their outspread
Splendor
Poised to clap
Or bend
A child’s delight
As God comes near
