37
What do you want me to say,
that I like the idea of being an animist, trees my
preferred object of worship? Not once has any tree
ever told me a thing let alone scooped me up and saved me
from the impending flood or an army of orcs surging
from the bowels of earth, sorry, Gaia, ok, Yemaja,
-yeah, yeah, The Ocean, let me finish-
I have listened carefully . . . once I climbed a six-story-high Maple to listen.
Just when I felt I was making some headway a drunk childhood friend
(we were friends since we were children and then adolescents experimenting
with everything from heights, to alcohol to God, just like you want to
instead of normal flirting) climbed one branch above me to see what I was up to.
The last branch actually, which snapped under her light, perfect athletic young body.
She fell six stories, landing on her back conscious enough to know instantly
she was paralyzed and would never ski again. No, that by no means broke her
faith, nor mine, but I highly doubt swapping notes on spiritual practices
is her preferred method of flirting. She is still devoted to sports.
I have not had visions when holding crouching dog for too long or is it arching crane?
I have done neither, but one time I went to Havana with a person much like yourself.
We got a reading from a santero, he gave us beads and a deity each, the beads were so heavy
we had to take the D Train to Brighton Beach and throw them into the sea.
I’m short of breath in saunas so I have never done a sweat lodge but three of my four
deadliest car crashes happened in Vermont where there are many non-Native American
sweat lodges
and after emerging miraculously unscathed from the gnarled remains of 3 out of 4 accidents
(once it was snowing) the sky was profoundly clear and blue, yeah like a door,
maybe a window, not sure.
Sure I’ve had a poem just ‘come to me as if I were a mere vessel,’ but not for
a long time and even those needed editing. Nothing sticks a thorn in my crown
more than a poet fishing to get laid with some spiritual mumbo-jumbo all prostrate
in a room full of guppies. You are correct, the gods’ ability to arouse is profound and
not inappropriate but it can be awkward, like in ’85 when I wanted to convert to Catholicism
in Apizaco Mexico because I was obsessed with the glow-in-the-dark crucifixes
sold outside the church, I wanted to buy as many as I could to sell to
Madonna fans in Boston but felt it would only be appropriate to convert first.
As I toyed with the idea, the idea grew until I could feel generations of Aztecs
pass through me when an old woman brushed my shoulder after prayer. Finally
one evening, after feeling embarrassed about buying yet one more glow-cross
from the same guy five days in a row, I stuffed it in my pants, it began to glow, I felt it,
my abdomen abuzz, my first look at a Victoria’s Secret catalog, ten, alone in the bath.
For all I know God is in lunch, during Ramadan we chose God over lunch for a month.
At sixteen I walked into La Grande Mosquée and announced I wanted to convert to
Islam.
They asked me to say Allah ila haa Mohammedan rasulullah, so I did.
They said, There ya go, you’re a moslem. Yes, it felt anti-climactic even in French.
Then again, celebrating Eid a year later with two thousand other moslems
in the foothills of the Himalayas in un-self-conscious synchronicity was proof
that Allah passes through all of us, with each transfer of spirit, unknown energies
are more palpable. Many times that year I had out-of-body experiences
to the point where I could see myself in context and realized I looked
as post-colonial as the Aussie hippy in Haridwar, saffron robes, beads
and bald head tonguing down his girl in front of Maya Devi Temple.
I will tell you this, one week after my brother died I saw something in the sky
(no, I won’t tell you what it was) that affirmed my belief that everything,
every faith, myth, superstition, miracle, rumor, conspiracy, cult, self-help program,
everything, all of it is true.
38
Truth: I have never apologized for my own skin before,
for the way Newark bends me like sunrise gleaming through bus windows
or the way I let myself go like doves at the matrimony of fate and free will.
Tell me this is the way things fall apart.
Truth: My ex-significant lover walked out of Buddy Wakefield’s feature last night on the
premise that God lives in North Carolina between the eye of a needle and the thread
weaving Aesop’s fables together. He claims to have a keen ability to detect heresy and,
apparently, lynch mobs don’t need rope or melanin before.
Lie: I am to blame.
Lie: A legacy of shame on the underbelly of a nation can be remedied
with
handshakes and convenient silence.
Truth: There are times when I am insecure in my humanity,
in the way my
body contorts and bleeds to keep this universe in balance.
Truth: Prejudice is the only way we’ve learned to box our own shadows,
saints whose
halos are one photon short of revealing themselves.
Truth: God could exist in the air,
blowing string-theory daffodils into the
nothingness without a care.
Would our trespasses be any less holy?
Dare-
tell me what your God looks like
sitting on a crumbling mountain of misdeeds
and
family trees bending in the wind.
Tell me how he learned to hate his own shadow,
how he taught his spitting images to split and
splinter
until we became the crosses that broke his spine.
Tell me how hate became dogma,
how love became an international distress signal.
Truth? God is a cutter.
She parades slash marks around Paradise
and plays with asps in her spare time;
call her Cleopatra with a mortal complex.
On her last bad day,
she lucid dreamt the Matrix and called it “Earth”
because “Gaea” sounded too easy to fall in love with.
She is in love with energy.
(She only gave humans sex organs because she confused us with the trees.)
Truth: God is a woman with Body Dysmorphic Disorder,
but she can come back if we let her-
stop superimposing our rough drafts of God
onto an unsuspecting deity
because she is running out of room on her arms
to carve an identity from.
Still workshopping the theory of everything
being birthed in her belly,
she hasn’t gotten to existence yet.
Save sexuality for second grade,
for she is just learning to spell her name
in kindergarten calligraphy,
and I guarantee it looks nothing like
Jesus or Buddha or Allah,
like Krishna or Moses.
It looks like big-bang theories
collapsing under the weight of change,
like a little boy finger-painting forever with a smile on his face
and it sounds, suspiciously, like home.
39
You are the sweat on the brow of a mother
in her thirteenth hour of labor.
You are the fickle
fingers of a child grazing
a splintery fence midday.
You are a sixteen-syllable sentence uttered
by a woman with beautiful lips.
You are the thousands of end-of-the-world
kisses in constant exchange at each
terminal.
You speak and rain falls upward.
You blink and butterflies dissolve.
There are shells of people out there trying,
each day, to become an atom in the vast
dance of your movements,
to seek the mode in the range of your
emotions.
You are bottled nebulae with a cork
that is waiting to pop
You are lunar flora: prickly pear cacti which
fill craters steeping in a celestial marinade
hailing from the Horsehead.
And should you stand beneath the sun for too
long, the land which surrounds you
would recede into the dark recesses
from whence it came,
and the soft luminescence of your eyes
would suffice to lead your way.
40
We learn in grade school,
that there is a finite amount
of matter on Earth. All that will ever
be on this planet, already is.
And there will never be any less.
It’s a hard concept to accept at first.
Because every last bit
of my grandmother’s body
seems to be gone. But in fact,
science says, even if you cremate
the arms and legs and ribcage
of the person you loved,
every molecule is still here,
it’s just that all the space
between the bones and the blood
is now eliminated, and so,
someone that used to take up
a whole bed, now, fits into a shoebox.
And my best friend’s daughter,
seemed to just start growing
inside her, as if she came from
nowhere and nothing,
but in fact, she is actually,
all the hamburgers
that her mother ate
for nine months
transformed into fingers and toes
and green eyeballs and golden curls.
And the only exception at all,
the only way for more matter
to arrive on earth is if meteors
or some other astronomical objects
unexpectedly glide our way
to land on one of our islands
or in one of our seas
and that’s what I think
I want to liken Love to,
at least for the metaphorical
purpose of this poem.
Because when it arrives, it does so
with an other-worldly crash
into the continents that are
our chests. And it is so strange,
so new, that I cannot believe
it was here all along, disguising itself
as some other thing.
I know, science says, Love is not matter,
but most days, it feels heavier than rocks.
And what I want to know
is where it goes when you
feel certain that you cannot
find it anymore.
There are ex-wives all over
the world, who at one point,
promised everything they ever knew
to their husbands,
allowed children
that were made of half of him
to swim inside her,
and drink from her,
and she thought he was a miracle,
better than any other answered prayer,
and then he destroyed her somehow.
Somewhere along the way
he forgot how extraordinary she was,
stopped seeing the certainly amazing
parts of her, and now
she hates him with a fever
that could cook a stew.
But where did all that Love go?
Where does it sit now, though perhaps
quiet, changed, but still with the same
number of atoms and molecules,
once as big as a mountain, now as small
as a seed—but it has to be here
somewhere, right?
I myself, have Loved in a Large way.
Love that was the size of an army
of dinosaurs, and now, I feel nothing
for that over-and-done Love.
I almost, cannot even remember
that Love, I have to read old poems
and inscriptions to find proof that it
ever was. But it has to be here
somewhere, right?
Maybe I will find it
under the rug, or swept
into a corner that I never visit,
or inside an old compact.
I suppose I may not even recognize it
when I do. Perhaps it is just
a spoonful of glitter now, and when
I come across it I will think it is
some eye-shadow that I forgot I bought.
I will maybe just shake my head
and wonder why I ever thought
that it would look good on me.
I Love in a Large way, right now.
And if I wake up in the middle
of the night, and look quietly
at the Love that sleeps beside me,
I cannot ever imagine
it leaving this planet for anything.
I am certain, despite what science says,
that Love is matter, that it will
never go away, and never get less.
I am also certain,
that it was not here all along,
and instead, it came dressed in flame
from outer space.
41
I fasten my mouth around yours like a plummet
from the bow of a sinking ship. Suck the red wine
from your breath until it hurts, until good memory
rises above us like God-ash and nothing is real
but your tongue, your coiled breath banging
the rusty screen door of my throat like a moan
that breaks free and dances across the dark.
The sticky shiner mooned around my eye socket
like a rain cloud waters at the touch, you pull my t-shirt
delicate as knifepoint up and over my head. It stings
where his pinky knuckle carved out a chunk
in my lip like a wood splitter. I am a hazard tank of bruise
and shame; you are a prayer that remembers how to listen.
The coin-edge crest in the crook of my nose
where that lonely bastard’s ring trucked into my skull
beneath that streetlight is still open and pink,
unstitched cartilage cursing at the air like an armless demon –
you place your lips on every part of me that has retreated
to a corner I never thought I’d find, soft and new,
whisper the names of each wildfire hue
beginning to eggplant swell and settle into a tornado
around my eye. I love you, harder than ever
and am overflowing with words I do not have.
Again. We are naked as morning in the black of this
brilliant summer heat. Wrapped in the tree-trunk
capes of each other’s wordless mouths like animals,
clawing from the water at our feet.
42
As if, I too, were in the bayou I kill a fly in my hands & stare
into the elm blood from my cut
lip on a bottle something moves and we call it Evenin’
rolling over in her slip of shade and nightsound as if, I too
were in the bayou sweat lit underlantern the body
’s tender
meridians you close your teeth on something bucks
in the switchgrass who else but Evenin’
shaking loose her blanket of prey as if
I too, were in the bayou how first I rip tissue from the bone
then break its sweet white horn
43
I.
Outside my window, through the orange drapes,
I can see a light on in the building facing mine.
It is late now, an hour past when well-behaved
citizens will have gone to sleep, and I wonder
who it is that finds themselves restless in this
perfect heat. Perhaps it is two people, lying
next to each other on the mattress, sheets
thrown to the ground, knotted on the floor. It
is too hot for lovemaking, surely. Too hot even
for touching. No, I am sure they have both just
been lying there awake, sweating into their
pillows, breathing in the muggy darkness, both
hands placed by their sides, fingers spread
open. They have both been lying still, one
of them desperately trying to fall asleep, the
other measuring the distance between their
fingertips, waiting until the humidity becomes
too wet, the fire on the skin too near; waiting
until this moment to turn on the bedside lamp.
Deciding finally, to honor this kind of arousal
with something other than breath.
II.
Most days, waking is the hardest.
But it is also when Poetry arrives—
stands patiently outside the shower,
places its hands on the mirror,
wipes away the steam.
And then there are days when
sleeping is the hardest. The fight
of muscle against world becomes
so constant, that surrendering
to slumber doesn’t promise
nearly enough relief. These are
the times when hands feel nothing
but empty. And these
are the times when the ceiling fan
is left off. When this heat
becomes the only lover
to hold, the only weight
that feels familiar anymore.
III.
Tonight, I raised my hand to my face
to brush away an untamed curl of hair,
and when it slid past my nose, it smelled
suddenly of you. Not your cologne, or
the soap you use, not shampoo or aftershave.
That skinsmell I find tucked into your
neckplace—that late afternoon nap’s shadow
that rises and falls, rises and falls against
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