USA

Thinking about Amy, who refuses to speak

The child wants to float
boxed in by fixed signs,
armored boots, no mercurial sandle.
She wants to fly into space.
She is not an angel but
beginning to learn the meaning of arboreal.

Ladder leap lie.
Parental square roots, set-jello gaze.

It's a matter of ropes, why?
Skipping double-dutch jumprope rhymes.
In her mind she flies a glass-bottomed
Piper Cub over October vines,
ground below cut like pieces of blue toast.
She has the diagram she's flying away from,
holds sun's wine on her tongue.

The chatter, the ladder, the pit-pat.
Her map laid out, her study will be gravity.

Is it grave she doesn't want to learn?
Did walls tumble?
Did she sit sucking her thumb?
How many people will cry
as she rises like steam from a rain-strewn branch
when the sun finally shines?

What we can't know

She offers embrace to a child coming in from the dark
where a forensic archeologist freed it from its violent past
in several locations around the globe.
Midwives of history are here, grief counselors implied.

Whenever the artist opens the borders of definition,
a great human wailing arises
and it's impossible to discern its impetus.
Does it come from the gagged voices of the disappeared
in all their unfixable floatings,
or from those who have used dark to carve out
sensate, utterant spaces,
vowing, "This is the single way to salvage light."

Bring out color
(following September 11, 2001)

Customary women in their table settings
Customary men walking with a rifle into the autumn woods
Harlequin on city streets, eschewing tradition
(even in their official rush, business people pause,
called first by his bells, then held by his carousel prance)

The itch at the corner of the mouth
The urge to fly out the window rather than sink
with the suddenly-sliding floor
Bare-back rider in spangled tutu

intervenes between the darkening tumble
and the hem of light

No time for subtlety or seeming
Pirouette now toward Kokoshka, Van Gogh,
Clifford Stills' invigorating blues

will bring breath back
into knees and feet
circle against hobble, against scourge

I have paint to brush into the void
I have a million extincting creatures to discover
I have friends to costume-consult before I die

Why did you call me, anyway?

1 The dream starts something

"This is a miracle," she said,
"the gerbil can talk,"
but I say the important thing is
what the gerbil chooses
to talk about. Or, once ability is honed,
whether it chooses to speak at all,
what it might judge to be
important enough to pack cheeks with,
touch tongue to the roof of the mouth
and pump breath over the larynx
loud enough that the true meaning be:
"Listen to me."


2 When speech is emotion's flag

"Oh hello how are you such a nice
shade of lipstick you're wearing
today is the kind of day we like
I have a good dinner for you
I closely resemble you
we can work things out hey
that's my leaf blower you have
your foot on the food you
served last time tasted awful
you smell bad don't come
near give me back I'm afraid
you want my car my work my deep-
freeze full of don't come around
here anymore you aren't like me"


3 The creative word

The myth says, "The old maker of fire
let the wind blow on his thinking strings"
to find the new way, the needed
action, the next being. Conceiving
the word, he made the thing.
The maker a praying mantis.
You put your palms together
which means you've stopped
kneading bread, milking the cow,
hanging clothes, applying make-up,
waxing the car, punching in numbers.
The praying mantis slightly cocks its head.
The gerbil sleeps during daylight.
Looking inside. Not looking.
A word that comes into prayer
has its own legs. It is not yours.
 

© All Copyright, .
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.