My Old and New Testaments

Boisterous with our shrieks and shouts,
my cousin Michael and I, seven years old,
hollered our heads off, chasing and strutting
and squealing under the ping-pong table
and over the bar counter and in and out
of the corner closet where my father stored
his war uniforms. Upstairs, my parents
were sleeping the sleep of adulthood,
far enough away to forget about completely
until we looked up at the mountain
my father was, six foot four inches, brushing
the ceiling with his thin curly black hairs: keep
it low, he said, calmly, palms pushing the air
down. He believed in the value of hard work,
he would break the minor laws of his fathers
before he would give up one day of the six
the god of labor had assigned to him--
even the day he was shot in the small intestine.
From his bed at St. Luke’s Hospital he leaned
over and whispered customers’ names and prices
of used cars into the ears of his incompetent sons.
My father started back upstairs into that realm
unfamiliar to us as the upper world, that other life
of exhaustion and rustled hair and wanting a peace
on the only morning he could sleep through.
So we went back to our own concerns--
we squeaked and screamed until, suddenly,
from the platform at the top of the stairway,
the pausing and the slowly-turning-around
and the descending: two-hundred-and-fifty pounds,
eyebrows furrowed, black eyes fixed the way
I’d seen him stare down a customer who wanted
only to test drive a car for the joy ride.
He reached out his right sergeant’s hand and--
not brutal, but quick and definite, a snap and a sting--
he slapped me on the left cheek and returned
back to regain whatever rest he could salvage.
It didn’t hurt much. But I screamed and wailed,
I thrashed and dived so deeply into myself
I didn’t notice his return, slow and silent,
leaning down to the height of my shivering body--
his skin the odor of cigar smoke, nest of gray hairs
strewn beneath his unbuttoned blue cotton pajamas,
his shadowed face. He stroked that seal on my skin
that was burning with the hand that rebuked me.
He kissed the flame out with his wet lips.

That Lightness

Tossing my daughter into the air,
black hair tussled, arms and legs
splayed out like a cat's in flight,
part thrill, part fear, the outburst

of joy, lost in abandonment,
that small space just beneath
the rough-cut pine joists supporting
the exposed ceiling, which is,

during the flicker of her visit, heaven,
if what we mean has something to do
with bliss, escape from the body,
such as the ache my arms feel now

when I catch her in my clasped,
half-open, ready-and-waiting palms
and pull her towards my chest
that's pounding from its own thrill

and fear of possible failure
--the imagined fall and chaos after--
our two faces against each other's,
hers wide-eyed and grinning,

mine whatever astonishment
looks like, both flushed with the blood
of the moment, and she enunciates
the password: mo'?--her parlance

for more, let's go, why are we pausing
when we could have perfection?--
and I fling her up again, each exertion
enflaming my burning muscles.

What parent wouldn't risk self-
combustion to keep their child
from one elation to another?
Isn't that our mission,

to be the force that swings them
like a rope from tree to tree
above our daily catastrophes,
our absurd predicaments,

our private obsessions? And,
let's admit it to ourselves,
don't we believe that if we continue
throwing them back they will keep

with them a little of that thinner air
and live their lives with some knowledge
of the infinite, that lightness, a space
we ourselves could never reach?

Solstice

Because we are moving through the waters of our lives.
Because of the new breeze through the screen door,
the sweet williams and poppies and the season’s first peonies,
the turtle in the center of the dirt road. Because of this opening out,
waterlines pink and white and yellow where the spring feeds the pond,
the purple outpouring of the butterfly bush, the yellow birds of the irises,
enormous bees in the blueberries, the black-with-scarlet-neck hummingbird
dipping its delicacy into the mock oranges. Because of this rising fever,
frogs treading the water like green stones sounding bass notes,
daisies chaining the hay fields, corn leaves up and out, on the trellis the first rose.
Because of neighbors around a fire, a drum in each lap, summer solstice, full moon.
Because this is the brightest dusk we have known all year, we tap our congas
and kilimbas, we clap, clatter and racket, we beat a ruffle and establish our rhythm,
slapping the steerhide, a pulsing pow-wow of purging our accumulated pressures,
the djembe and the akaiko and the rum drum and the rattles. And some clicked sticks
and some made whistles and flutes with their hands and someone blew the digeridoo.
Because we are alive we make music, we announce our joyful uproar
that is all-at-once the history and hieroglyphics of our hearts.
Because in a chamber of a burial cairn in eastern Ireland 4000 years ago
a huge stone bowl contained the cremated ashes of the surrounding community.
Because through a narrow window positioned just above the east-facing doorway
the first ray of light penetrated its entire length to beam upon those ashes. Because
each of us holds down a day job. Because we have replaced slate tiles
and nailed in two by fours and counseled souls who thought they were lost,
pounded in tomato stakes and spoken calmly to a weeping child,
handled a back hoe until baptized in our own waters. We’ve worked for our wages,
run our errands, dusted or considered dusting, sealed envelopes,
and each of us have at some time or another felt the lingering
of the light, each of us have measured our tempos with the pulses
of this longest day of our year. Because the winter, as expected,
lasted longer than our expectations. Because the spring was way too wet
and the frost moved in to live with us and nobody got the seeds in on time.
Because we are amazed at this soft air, at how for some odd circumstance
the moon is full during the very hours we will drop all of our disappointments
and congregate to where we are invited. Because we are also the force
that will not stop accumulating, this insistence toward our own fulfillment.
What is this, that keeps us building more rooms? Planting more seeds?
Raising more children? What is this that keeps us turning over our earth?
We know we are dying. Some of us are breaking down right now.

Some of us have had limbs removed and the cancer has shot up our spines,
this hour some of us are watching our own hearts turned inside out and squeezed dry.
We know the chaotic smugness of the dark apartments.
We know the way the shattered edges of a lightbulb feel in our palms at 3 a.m.
We know how words can lay splattered like vomit on our own clothing.
There is no accounting for how all this gets layered in with the way we watched
the full moon appear piece by piece until it was fully realized.
Like if you stare long enough at a face the contours of the bones will clarify.
Because we know we have somehow made it to this moment
though we don’t know how, or why. Because we all have our theories.
Each of us will sit you down and look you in the eyes and touch your shoulder
and explain for hours what is really an elaborate summary of how we came to be alive
                                                                  at this particular place and time.
Because the lettuce picked an hour ago has gone to our heads,
what with all that sunlight and soil digesting through our systems,
all that leafy succulence breaking down and changing us.
Because the sky has become the color of the fire, because the idea
of a community mixing its ashes in a stone bowl makes us wonder
who gathered them together? Was it another community paying homage?
Or was it the wind that eventually carried a measure of each individual bone
and drifted the accumulated dust into where it knew the light would sweep over,
through the narrow window, each and every year, the earth commemorating its own.

After Reading Paul Celan

Everything is aflame with its own endings.

Leaves take to the wind, a white feather
attached to the porchrail flutters its bird.

I walk beyond the church’s stoic
silence, the cemetery’s bones muttering
who-knows-what, into where darkness
takes over.

        I’ll bring it home to my family.
It will sit down with me at the table
and stay until I return to my desk,
its reflection suspended in the window.

The edge of the woods stares back
from the underbelly of the surface, smoke
from the next valley pours itself into nothing.

Will we go without being forgiven, then?

And our dying parents alone with their failed
memories, we don’t know how to save them.

We know the limitations of a life,
but not the pocket of air the snow will fill,
or how the dusk is swallowed in its own embers.

One moment out of all the others--that’s ours.

The first snow of the season stutters
out of its long sentence of silence.
It will cover the field in its great maturity.

Look at the ground, out future.
Or is it the sky that will claim us?
Or will we become part of the larger whiteness?

Do not read anymore, he said: look!
Do not look anymore, he continued: go!

In This Corporeal Light

after St. Augustine

I’m a slave to lust, you chanted in Latin,
never the Greek you hated, practical Roman,
embarrassed by your sorrow for Dido

who burned her enflamed body for another’s flesh,
which, after all, you were, that goes away
and returns not, snow into a wind, dry leaves

into the soil, men wandering lost from Troy
to Carthage to Rome to found a city
not your own, a world of bread and rhetoric

into which you disappeared and then condemned
from the light of your new distance. How I long
to have been seated in that classroom

when you were assigned to recite the complaints
of Juno, that false goddess, those made up words
of passion and grief simply for our applause,

what you now call smoke and wind and air.
Not being a Christian, my hands would have clapped
the way they would have helped pick each sin

shaped like the pears you stole and, like you,
thrown them at the pigs, loving the evil,
the childhood theft you confessed in your middle age.

God has heard so many but yours was the first,
which must have sounded to Him the way
you described your first noises as a baby:

gurgles and spits and babbles for attention.
Another son of Adam, a multiplication of grief,
you woke each day to the clanking chain

of your mortality until that famous hour of wonder,
in a confused silence, under a fig tree.
A voice from a distant room whispered to open
the great Book and read whereon your eyes rested,
the way the superstitious allow a passage
to establish the rest of their lives.

I do not wish to mock, August, your transformation--
but I prefer this shadowed room, these candles
burning down right now into their blue glass holders,

what you said before the conversion:
my one delight was to love and be loved.
Last night my lover and I made sweet love,

we numbered in our poverty every hair
on the other’s skin with our fingertips and tongues,
our desire insatiable, and so I take on faith

what you give to the poor and I receive your provisions
for my own flesh, recalling your last moments
with your mother, before an open window,

--you closed her eyes and gave yourself to grief--
where I leave you now, great Saint, meditating
on the marvelous in this corporeal light.