The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.
While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.—
from the Sufi poet Hafiz
Tag: poetry
Don’t Blink
Maybe when the moving van is idling in the driveway. Or as the plane lifts off. Maybe when the only ones left encircle the bed with whispers of permission. Or when chain link goes up around the place where lovers learned to fox trot long before they could imagine what would be lost.
It’s rarely so clear when we have our last shot.
Endings don’t come with a narrative pause.
When they do, the impulse is to fold like shutters. Pain approaches on horseback. Voiceless momentum, the vibration down low, the faint stink of iron and scorched powder. Get small and douse the lights. Better yet, dash out the side door and don’t look back.
My grandmother told me about the dust coming like night. More than a vision of it choking out the horizon, it was a growling, quickening pulse. Like the collective hackles of every living thing — mule deer, jackrabbit, gnat — bristled to action. Burrow. Batten down the hatches. Take cover.
Run.
It takes an act of will to unclench. That ending is not going to put on rouge or slow its gait. To look it right in the eye means staring down something whose ugly keeps expanding as it shambles into view. No wonder the urge is to cut it off before it can fill the frame. Call it claiming the story. Call it authorship. Call it power.
Call it for the cowardice it is.
Dare instead to turn towards that death. Creak open. Blink clear. See the arrival of the departure.
See it whole.
The architecture. The clay shards. Cracked paint, rusted locks, weathered lips. The polished steel fragment of a fallen bridge.
See the lines in its face. The leathered scar that masks its soft place.
Dare to love completely what you already mourn.
The chance won’t come again.
Bug Bites: Zen and the Angry Child
You mustn’t suppose
I never mingle in the world
Of humankind —
It’s simply that I prefer
To enjoy myself alone.
– Ryokan
Into the morning blue he wakes as dark-eyed as when he greeted night. He hurls himself at me, his hair like snapdragon stalks unpruned along the fence of his fury.
“Idiot,” he grumbles. I am at a loss. First I tell him if he’s old enough to use that word, then he’s old enough to make his own breakfast. Then I change course. Thorns will not be the texture of our day. I slide from the bed and crawl across the carpet to my splayed and scowling son. Right up close, I say, “I love you, baby, and you love me. I always know it.” I wrap my arms around him and tickle his sides. As he wrenches himself away, he bites back the smile I catch peeking. “Even if you don’t feel it right this minute, I know you love me.”
“No I DON’T.” Cold simmer cuts up from under the blonde cloak shadowing his gaze.
When he was two, he declared himself a girl. Rainbows on his underwear. Sequins in his hair. His third and fourth birthdays were pink crowns and princess cake. In his fifth year, he shed the tutu and snapped on a fist. He has not unclenched it since, except in moments belly-flat on the floor or twined sticky into me. Moments when he forgets.
While the oatmeal simmers under its skin of sugared cinnamon, he arranges a dinosaur jungle on the floor. The T-Rex pounds at the lesser beasts. A barrage of high-impact explosions upends all the palm trees leaving half a dozen herbivores strewn across the killing field.
I watch him wander into the tangled garden of his imagination and take corners I can’t see. I tiptoe to the edge and consider joining him there. Does he need the company of others, of playmates, of me? My only child turns away and blazes a trail alone among his hedgerows. Is it labyrinth or maze? He is not reluctant to find his own way in. I wonder what, if anything, compels him to follow the thread back out again.
Returning home at the end of day, we trip our way to bed after fighting over dishes, teeth, bath. It is time to surrender to routine. Both of us need to waltz our way back to a rocking gait that smooths the friction at the edges where we meet. Three books. Three songs. Every night for six years.
He has a fairy blanket on the bed. It is the last vestige. He keeps it close even in the August swelter. With Tinkerbell bunched at our feet, we read Zen Shorts for the 400th time.
“Mommy, why is this book called that?”
“Well, the three stories Stillwater tells all come from Zen. And they’re all short.”
“What’s Zen?”
Oh geez.
“I guess it’s a way of living. It’s very old. Thousands of years, maybe? It has to do with making quiet places inside your mind and body.”
He twists away from me. Restless, ever moving. He is all proboscis and fire ant. A cement mixer. A quicksand man. I have had to learn to test my footing before every step. “You know how we talk about breathing when you’re wound up? Or when I heat up? Zen is about getting still. Like Stillwater in the book. Then you can accept things without needing them to be different.”
Zen Cliff’s Notes. Am I close? He’s humming and tapping his fingers in a pattern along the wall. I touch the edge of his leg just enough to make contact but not enough to capture his attention and raise his inevitable ire. “Even when there’s craziness all around you, even if a robber comes into your house or people say mean things, you stay peaceful inside yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay.”
“It’s not just for kids,” I tell him. “Here.” I get up and go find the book of Zen poems a friend gave me back when time to play with meditation was there for the taking. Or rather, when we chose to see abundance in a clock face rather than just its pinching glare.
I open to Ryokan.
Here are the ruins of the cottage where I once hid myself.
“Okay, whatever. That’s enough,” he tells me. The gold ribbon marking the page hides down in the spine. He pulls it away and trails it down over the back. “Now you’ve lost your place,” he tells me.
“Good,” I say. “I was hoping for that. Now I can start at the next place.” I leave the ribbon free and close the cover. The cottage is far behind me. I am alone on my unmarked path but also tangled at the root with a boy whose opening is his own to burn or tend.
“Are you mad?” His grin crouches in the dry weeds. His eyes cut a path to me. He is ready to pounce.
“No, baby. I’m nowhere close to mad. I’m happy to be here with you, exactly like this.” I set the poems on the floor and open my voice for the first song.
Lunar Equinox
It is frost now, still
faltering between
chill blue knife and furred limb.
Moon meets sun in a garden of stars,
all visible in half-night. A red-tailed fox
skies across gunmetal dawn
feet never touching
the ground. Babies begin
in groaning belly
of robin, raccoon. A squirrel
squatting on the wrist of a high vine
scratches at the shell of last year’s seed. The bare end
of provisions before the next harvest means lean times
for a merciless brood.
The yield may suffice.
It may not.
The way to survive is to live as if both are true
at all times.
Remember: the equinox lasts
a single night. Each of us is on one side or the other
even if the lifting foot is only just clearing the line
even if the bottomless blue still saps any recollection
of fertility. By a hair each day, darkness falls away.
The crack in the ellipse
narrows, the coin tilts on its axis and slips
through. The first moon
of spring is a fat dubloon winging
across the frosted miles, casting off
as it turns the full gleam from the sun. It is only when you stand
just so and gaze just there that you can gauge its trajectory
and lift out your shirt
to collect what spills
over, such riches
only last through twilight and by dawn
you will be blind
again.
Mass x G x Height
Stillness is impossible.
Just try to stand
frozen. Ankles flex. Toes grip. Knees
hips spine skull
of course the brain, a multitude
of microscopic adjustments. It is not
stillness
that holds you firm
to the skin
of the earth
but motion. A taxidermist
would have to stuff your sack of flesh
with rebar and concrete to keep you
upright. And still
one gust could take you down. And still
you are not
even aware of the exertion
required
to stay exactly where you are, no less
or more
than what you might expend
by taking
that step.
Mr. Sandman
O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.– W. H. Auden
I do the worst harm to the one I love the most. The dreams crafted with crayon and glitter begin to crack. His flavor sours. His voice slips off key. I fidget under my sheets and try to sink back to the breathless place. I lift my eyes to the receding ceiling, carve a hole, and slip out without looking back.
Flight and stars. I careen over rooftops. This works until it doesn’t. Gravity always wins.
Nearing the middle of life, only now I am waking up?
In the half-place where I still squeeze my eyes shut and cling, I feel the grit against my shoulder, against my scuffed shin. I finally achieved flight, and yet I lay there with my wings limp on the earth and think, That’s it? That’s all it is?
He will never be better than the man he is right now. I am what I have become. It is this, not the next thing. Not the up there, out there, over there. Not door number two, three, or four.
This. Right here.
The moon does not bend to us. The night is not a swelling sea. He does not tuck jewels under my ribs. I do not hear the choir sing.
Does anyone else here hate the lover for this betrayal?
The abuse of disabuse. We are all battered. Notions no one ever named out loud (silver sprites and dappled light) reveal themselves as a worn felt hat. A trick deck. All face cards, an overabundance of Queens of Hearts.
Enchantment lingers, the coin tossed 100 times until the bets are off. Until the game is over. Forfeit? No, just bored with it. The aged ones are ready to move on. Their loves are pedestrian arrangements. We believed ourselves so much better. I will never speak so cruelly to my beloved. We will never sit in opposite corners of the house chasing down our solitary pleasures.
We believed ourselves truer.
At least I did.
Do I admit it now?
I hid the third dimension. He was satisfied with the point and line and didn’t lift the corner to feel around underneath. I tilted. He failed.
The angles were off. The roof gave way.
I re-wrote history. I razed the love I must (surely) have once occupied. I used a wrecking ball. Then an x-acto knife.
I claimed it was the wind and poor calculation.
How could I have possibly believed it would be easier without the lean-to we had erected? What did I think would be here outside our feeble shelter?
The fantasy fulfilled? Dreams in flesh at last?
Foolish girl. It is just exactly what was there before only without the micrometer of certainty to keep the storms at bay. Only with a lot more toil. Only truth (for what it’s worth).
And surely in time we will start to confront the failures of understanding and the disenchantment familiarity brings. In time we will face the knowledge of what we can never, never expect from one another.
– Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses
Waking up is not without pain. Nevertheless, raw skin and all, it beats the alternative.
Love Lettering
Who will receive this next
ink ribbon folded back on itself, tucking
the pulp heart of the matter
into its own layered belly like an origami crane?
As if for peace
offerings and platonic love, I write to him
(or is it you?) yet contemporaries of Plato knew
that Mercury conceived the alphabet
from the sight of those wings V-cutting the sky
and words are nothing more than traces of hollow
bone and feathered vein, the page
a leaf stirred to flight.
Pen nib, beak, and paper’s razor edge.
Perhaps it takes on a power of its own, this letting
into letters a promise I fancy
a vial drawn from Delphi and ferried
in talon to brush his trembling lips
(or yours)
with prophecy,
with Us.
Alas.
When he (or you) unfurl the knot
of scratchings here, neither gods
nor philosophers tumble out,
no. Not even a waterbird
for all this trouble. Just abracadabra and alaka-zam,
a spatter of angles and curlicues casting
untested home-cooked spells.
This tattered plea calls not on him
but you,
(yes, you)
to fold back the edges, to smooth open
the wrinkled sheet. I beg
your mercy. Use your hands. Clear a place. Let divination
spread itself
across the waiting acre
of us.
Proboscis
The brooch must contain traces
of her. In the solder bearing glass
to wing, a bit of cell, a fleck of skin
resides, this amulet is her
as much as mine.
The butterfly falls open
in my palm.
By caress and incantation
the jinn unfurls from brass
antenna and twines around
my naked face
planting one kiss then another
dozen the way she did, her powdered cheeks
fluttering, alight
until I squirmed from the onslaught
of an affection,
so much like thirst.
“I know you love me,” she would say
on her way into the hall, closing
the door on fleeting dusk, my visit
in that blink of summer never long enough to probe
under folded silk slips and kidskin gloves
to unearth each rose bead, each hidden leaf
of virgin jade. I loved her in return,
I suppose (as if a child has any notion
of the magnitude of such a claim). She told me I did
so this is how I know
that when the jeweled pin
pierces the wrap at my breast, she is
what thrums there
drawing nectar from the pistil
still, but with all the latent force
of flight.
Defenestration
Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
– William Shakespeare, As You Like It
At the upper lip
of a gilded wall the world slips
open beneath the half-lifted arm
of a woman whose locks trace
cirrus cloud and azure
day. Out there, the ancients whisper
fingertips against your
seeking arm and warm
forgotten skin like a shaft of light
showing you the way
to where the wakening occurs
despite haze cloaking sun,
miles to cover
and a capricious chill
at your unsheathed neck.
Physical Education
The affliction is a sack of gravel without a strap.
It demands to be moved.
They bear it together.
He plucks the handkerchief
from his pocket and wipes his brow.
This address here is barely a footstep from where they began.
You did not give it your all.
The accusation is not spoken
aloud. It does not need to be.
He is right. She has made no headway
in urging the burden towards its destination
(where was that again?)
He says she has done nothing, that those inches
gained were his. That she has ridden free.
Her exertions are lost on him. It is all press
and no progress. She has frayed
her back, torn connective tissue, bruised bone.
Sweat is easily mistaken for tears.
Force against force.
The problem is one of physics.
She suddenly understands this.
A single choice:
air accepts her invitation. A rending
sets free the clutch of gravity.
She splits open. He loses his grip. The sack sags
and 359 other directions
of travel appear. They both tumble out to sky.
Off she drifts, loose from the pod that held the seed.
Fluff and dust. It catches a gust.
Weight is barely a memory.
Shannon E. Williams 