delightful…
I watched the dolphins swim,
the blue sky, cloudless, like an unwritten song,
and I felt the shadow of the years,
heard a footfall
like a stone
dislodged
by the wind.
Was it you,
and I was being remade
even then?
for Xan at fourteen
You are all the light in the world
gathered into a face,
your eyes deep space and stars—
who are you?
When you sleep, your breath stirs
the brooms of ages, dust shifts:
your skin is gold,
the past opens itself to your many dresses,
the night unravels its blue wool:
you stand on a far shore
about to set sail—
where are you going?
When you laugh,
the graves open, the dead put on makeup,
the souls of children wake up:
who will go in your company?
You are a stir of wind,
the scent of rare wood,
your mind mirrors the breath of sages,
your thoughts are new.
I called you and you came.
I loved you and you grew,
but who knew
this grace,
the wound flower in the heart’s chain?
Concerning Self-Examination and the Recollection of God
Self-Examination
You came into this world for one purpose,
and that was to learn
the story of all beings,
but you let the account fade.
You could have asked—they were willing to tell all—
but every hour you neglected dreams
and accumulated regret.
For the whole of your life
you said one thing:
please show me the love in which I reside—
and one day,
in the presence of death,
you saw.
Ah, me.
Shadrach
Sometimes the god
is hanging up laundry
next to a furnace.
He nods, opens the furnace door,
beckons, steps in.
You know who he is,
and his two friends—
sometimes they wash themselves in flames,
sometimes I am washed too,
my skin crisp like gold foil,
sometimes that’s all there is:
just the walking,
and the heart still human, exultant—
for something has been understood
about the flame inside, the flame out,
about thought polished to a
molecule-loosening dagger
that permits all.
Meshack
Sometimes the god watches soap
and water slosh behind glass at a laundromat:
not even he can see who or what
is being cleansed—
he waits, like anyone would,
for an outcome
so he can start over
if he has to, or find some other reason
to link inner and outer,
self and self.
Abednego
No gods are visible,
but people buy groceries,
open and shut car doors beneath
unconscious rain from over the sea.
They are well within the view from my father’s window
where he sits in a chair
to watch a tree yield, light bend, the horizon
flex as darkness tidies itself
into a sharp drumroll.
I mail my letters,
pray he has time to catch that last
glint
of a mast.
Sooner or later I will try
to name that ship.
The Ship
You can choose what form the flame takes
just as I
chose the stone of your white forehead
on which to place my lips,
and that stone, now, entombs me.
I kept from you
my adoration, my passion,
and that you had my heart all along.
A broken cup.
So it is said, so I know
no one enters Heaven
without their father and mother,
some mending,
some rolling away of stones.
North
If the word for a ship means
glacier, even iceberg,
then there are limits to the world:
seven seas slip between
the known world
and its warm shadows,
opposites crack
the planet.
In the Earth’s core—
the