Darling, it should
Come as no surprise to you
I have rescued each of these from something
So shall we name them–downfall, downfall, downfall, downfall, downfall, downfall
or indelible redemption
Naming Strays
Reply
Remedial Botany
I neglect to tell the children
Why It was I had to
trim the tangled branches,
Cut, unbraid the predatory vines snaking scars into the flesh
Of these ever watchful trees
I should have rescued long ago
Angel in the Hallway
We are surrounded by angels
Some live
Just the other side of the spectrum of visible light
And some in fluorescent-tinged hallways
Their aura mixed with the pointillism of city lights and leaving
notes of reasonable return and the glow, unmistakable glow of
Lullabies
Which remind us they are always undiminished
While we are merely
sleeping.
Little Lanterns
I will send you a million, million
Little lanterns
Rising points of light
from the same lit flame
Each inscribed with the story of how I lost you
How could I have lost you
When the greatest of these is love,
Little Lantern?
Pearl
Once upon a time the Treasure of the world entire told a story about treasure in a field, treasure within treasure, a kingdom in a kingdom in a seemingly arbitrary object, a field of the whole world
I remember when these angry men were children, lovable children, and now they behave as though they still don’t know
You are the treasure
The King and his Kingdom is the treasure.
And if that were not enough, what will a man do if he (gains the whole world)
And loses his own soul?
Levitas
The children hover above
The greenest grass
Their small, bare feet
flip back and forth rhythmically keeping them
Aloft, airborne hummingbirds
Their father questions this decision
This ordinary use of levitation which can only be
Accomplished by the very young
But I insist I remember once being just such an unfettered soul
Defined by light
Dearest Girl,
Pfft. I started to write a short story about you and your fairy godmother. She is a larger-than-life-take-no-guff fictional lady who lives in a real house in a real town where we both had our hearts broken.
She had a red-brick house with an actual turret in the middle of the cozy little town Kipling called Muskrat–Kipling, who might have advised handing you over to Baloo or Bagheera had you and I met up with him in our peripatetic trips about town.
I would let you run (fast as you can) to each stop sign (but wait for me there), most alarming for the people in their cars, always concerned you would just keep running.
I realized I could not finish the story. You can’t know a fairy godmother is trustworthy on the first or the second or the 500th day. You can’t know until
You figure out for yourself why and how she stares down all comers
As the most beautiful music
Spills out over the lawn, into the dark, dark night.
Military Polonaise
The girl with the long, dark hair bows her head in prayer as the ghostman’s call to arms wafts across our breaking
Passover bread, the belief that all promises are binding
Will keep us, will keep us
Bound to the hands of beauty
We live in other rooms
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
Justice is Love’s Surname
Survivors get to decide what they do with their story.
My daughter reminds me of this when I complain about a particular rape narrator who seems to be exonerating people who actively refused to value her need to be heard over points in a game.
What I would tell if she answered my email is:
- Describing your rape in sexually explicit details obscures the message that rape is always about anger and power and objectifying the victim. Do not give potential felons a script for how to commit a crime.
- Why exonerate anyone who has now or in the past facilitated rape culture? Anyone who actively compensated for rapists needs to be called out and fired, not hugged and beatified–no matter how many teams he or she has taken on to victory.
- What happened to you has and will happen to a lot of other people–male, female, gender non-binary, old, young, non-consenting. Don’t sell all of them out by sanitizing or excusing deeply broken human systems.
- Don’t unwittingly hand potential perpetrators a script for rape. Whether or not you realize it, when you tell a story where no one has enforced negative criminal or civil consequences for raping you, you are not changing rape culture.
- No victim of rape should walk down the road you have. Every person deserves incisive rules for sexual safety. We need to change those rules.
- Most victims chose or are pressured into silence. They should not have to fear the stigma of being a crime victim who speaks out..
…but they are, and as long as they are, your message is not enough, whether it is what you say or don’t say to a group of athletes, or what you tell the mother of a rape victim
By not answering her at all.
Carrying Light 