Ashes

The label on the canister says it’s you.
But it doesn’t look like you.
It doesn’t sound or feel or smell like you;
I won’t believe this is what you’ve become.

Sifting through fine particulate,
I try to feel your lined face.

I study the grains and pieces of bone--
searching hard, but recognize none.
Just days ago, an embrace
couldn't fully contain you.
Now here you are, in just
the space of my palms,
so lightly borne.

I pray
that the part of you
that needs to be whole
for you,
has been restored in heaven,
so that these obliterated parts
will stop shaking in my hands.

My tears, they flood your sandy body,
but fail to put you back together.

I try to fathom every speck:
That this urn should house
your heart and brain,
your skin and eyes,
your womb and breasts,
your hands and hair.
It contains as well, your last day:
Your pain, your fear, then letting go--
the lungs that failed you in the end;
the morphine, too, was burned with you.

Some of me, as well, is ash--
for there will be no turning back.
No recovery of those parts
that Death fragments into dust.

I search the crumbs
over again, and know
that I am made of this.

Omen

It should have been
like other mornings.
Even five-year-olds are set
in their ways and know
when something isn’t right.

And something wasn’t right.

A chill like black chrome
killed comfort in the routine
of breakfast then cartoons.
A pall occluded bright blue eyes, and
here was dread, an unkind promise—
a sickening portent of proximate danger.

This was an ordinary home yesterday.
Now, it was my Gethsemane.


Published at Wordlust : Paperfetish, May 20, 2005

Archeology of the Self

What visitors see
is the withering.
Is this me in ten years?
Dad acts out our undoing.
We’re taking notes, some of us.

One wants to fixate
on the tumor and the
wasting and the fact
that Dad sleeps with his eyes
open—that’s not a good sign.
God, he sleeps so much
these days.

Old friends funnel in and
out of the sickroom, milling
close to the door, minding
the invisible force field
around the bed.
Breathing only through their
mouths, they stare
out the window because
as far as they can tell, nothing
outside is dying.

Dad’s moaning throbs
somewhere in our own bodies,
the way a tuning fork sounds
its tonal correlates.

We’ve decided
that this is failure.
This is how we
let go of the wheel
and careen head-on
into fate.
Dad says there is still
important work being done.

Impossible.

Where is the good
in protracted suffering?
By whose standards
are purulent sores
meaningful?

This looks like decline,
says Dad from his death throne.
The process appears unduly
corrosive, I know.
But look closer girl…this…this
is an excavation through my self.

The ruins are obvious enough.
That the work of digging and sifting
is difficult and tedious, is apparent.
You see how dirty it is. How
back-breaking. You notice
debris piling upon debris.
But Daughter, this is
the only way depth
can be attained.

The only way.

Here, in this silty midden
is evidence of repeated cataclysm
and rebuilding. You see that?
Trowelling and tunneling,
I crumble into myself
overjoyed, imagining
a grotto—and finally,
there is discovery.

Days of sinking into
yet more sinking, rewarded
at last with landing
upon a seminal structure, a foundation.
Today I have unearthed something original.

Under strata of ego and duality,
beneath layers of separation and fear,
and webbed in a matrix of light
dazzles a flint of soul.
And girl, would you believe
that after all these years,
it still works.

Surveillance

To look straight into the eyes
is to see the thing itself that lives—

the ghost who occupies the form
and who watches you in turn.

To stare into those glassy pools
of jasper, lapis and peridot, one sees

the blackened spinning spokes
of thought, of life, of shimmering pulse.

Careful to avert our gaze from orbs
that like the sun, burn bright, we

duck our heads and with furtive
glance, avoid falling into cold,

hot depths, or the chance that
in the lens we’ll glimpse

the reflection of God’s
own terrible face.

The Dream of Horses

Three horses trudge
the heavy water,
and unless they drown
they’ll reach the other side—
black nostrils flared,
foaming transformation;
spitting, coughing
the residual spume
of who they were.

They keep sick water
in their lungs and
hear it sloshing
in mid gallop.
All prick their ears
in rapt alert
listening, hoping
the sound should come
from something else.

And on they go
snorting, wheezing,
carrying the river
like a stowaway.
Horses—no more,
but not yet whales,
they stall at the next bank,
ready to drink
but reluctant to swim.

If only they could be
taller than that river.

Sea Worthy

Diligent, we are treading
an indifferent world.

Cold and heavy and
up to our necks,
it means to consume us.
So we tread
beyond pain
and past weariness,
keeping it outside.

Biding storms
and jagged rocks,
we’re lost in the roil
spitting and gasping,
counting to ourselves
as the tempest takes
us then in threes.

La Mer’s abundance
swells to feed us.
But land is heaven;
we want no more fish.

Let me sink and drift.
Let me sleep, and dream I’m an anchor.
Let me quit this vessel
to become a city of barnacles,
happy to number among
the ocean’s anonymous bounty.

Today--just for today,
bloating, blind,
incautious of lures and nets,
I am the burden of waves.

Published at Wordlust : Paperfetish, May 6, 2005

Survivial Instinct

Those sedentary ways
make a home for
dusty cobwebs.
Mites increase and nest
in boredom’s vacant crannies.

Opportunists anywhere
along this crowded food chain
can spot a meal
from miles away.
Consumption is inevitable.

Hold fast your grip
onto the rungs
of primal limbic wisdom.
Survival begs
that there are just
two kinds of creatures:

Us,
and them.

Published at Wordlust : Paperfetish, April 29, 2005

Heavenlash

Clouds, tufted and woolly
smeared at the edges, marble
a tin-foil sky.
The trees beneath stand
lush and green, and not
just green, but many
kinds of green—
Crowns of jade, of emerald, of peridot
fan against their chrome horizon:
Great verdant afros.

Neck unhinged, I
track rolling caravans
of cumuli—
crystal laden and
chased by winds, like
herded beasts on yellow plains.

Startled by growling thunder,
I know that if the sky moves,
indeed it lives.
And what am I,
but a grain of dust
afloat the currents of
God’s great breath?

Published at Wordlust : Paperfetish, April 15-2005