Why is saw blade made?
Zig-sag of teeth against
my grain, my gain, my rain, my rein.
Nailing words on trees in the forest, leaves
susurrate like pages, but can’t read for themselves.
Trembling upward, wing-over-wing, all the birds called home,
Halving the music, having it fly upward with them, they
bother the stratosphere with all warbling and winging—
quilling sky.
Xanthic eyes
pored over every memory of you. Poured myself. Poored my own memory
operating away from itself.
Kindling catches, but there’s no more wood for this fire. This fire
exacerbates the cold,
cakes itself all over these hands
until they’re not hands.
Re-enter. Something can be worked out.
Justification by feint, by faint, by fifth, by filth.
Love me past
& forward, but not now. Now I’m
demon for saw-teeth & nails
instead of words. When we were
younger we read poets, we were bright
versions of our jaundiced selves.
Xanthic (adj.) acidic yellow
Proper Abecedarian 2: Possibility
. . .& while everything else was rapt watching angels
bother the air with their wings—those
caked-on-lights’ glory/fire/stormwind: signifiers of not-
demon, surely-Other, surely-newsbringing, fear-
exacerbating (as if we didn’t tremble enough),
faint-faced, trumpet-voiced. While all that’s
ground-(maybe even water)-view, what shape messengers
halve the distance between birds (bats? bugs?) and heaven? What blasts “ANGEL!”
instead of WINGS? What intermediary
justification of bird’s being
kindles the awe of unwinged creatures
loosened from birth from the un-numinous surface?
My havoc, my hectic, my hamshackled harking: I’m
nailing questions on the innocent blue,
operating my own weighted machinery,
poring over the hagiographies, hoping for
quaver up the back of the neck; for
reentry of revelation or reverence to order:
“Susurrate the air, make liver, lungs, gut, heart
tremble recognizably.
Until tremble, until susurration, until quaver—some
version of supplication: think light into someone else’s hands.”
Why should the beasts of the air have need of angels? Their
xanthic eyes already see everything as they
zig-zag the air like feathers falling, like leaves, like messages falling.
Disorderly Abecedarian 3: Kenosis
Returning from church or the cliff-edge, she spread her arms.
Meanwhile, the others lay themselves down along the shore.
Perhaps selchies. Perhaps for every animal, there is a tribe who can remove their skins.
By their skinlessness, by their dreams, by furtiveness—
how they might be known.
Nay bloodworm, nor buzzard can know which of their sisters,
whether any of them chooses, whether each alive thing is
xylem in its soul—tough, fibrous, hard to cut
down, to be nourished by.
Love, some find themselves reaching out of their own skins,
each toward sentience, speech, walking, or longing to
gather themselves only ever with themselves
again, again, against & among
or away into a second nature.
For all flesh shall in their second selves see new gods,
certain of them will walk and walk
to find hiding places for their first skins, a universal
kenosis, all walking away from the divinity of first being,
unraveled until only humans. Leaving, then, only the trees:
justice and judge
zenith and zendo.
Yet the bloodworm, the single unstinging jellyfish, the krill
vent themselves back into their unskins,
quiet again.
I cannot find my own first skin.
Some other godling fills it, fails it.
Kenosis (noun), Christ’s relinquishment of divinity in becoming human.
Xylem (noun), water-conducting tissue of woody plants.
Proper Abecedarian 3: Eleven
Again: Poppies & Flags for a war whose soldiers gone
by into the bield of forgetting remembrance forgetting. I am not
certain how spring bulbs’ leaves bayonet up through soil without grinding
down their tips, raggeding them like dried blood.
Each eleven seemed sufficient
for peace. Bones and old shells still push through French soil, ragged as dry blood.
Gather, Old Soldiers, 100 years & the same war push up bloodied, same
how same millions, row on row. How bulbs lance upward; spring.
I learned to recite “In Flanders’ Fields” in 8th grade. Did
justice best I could. It’s all armistice,
kenosis, each soldier relinquishing divinity, each
leaf within bulb gives up milky safety of sleep, pushing upward.
Meanwhile: Omaha, Nagasaki, Pusan, My Lai, Rwanda, West Bank, Helmand—
nay bloom in 100 years not red—
or genocide, genocide, genocide, cleansing, genocide—forced kenosis.
Nay bloom in 100 years not red.
Perhaps this time. Perhaps un-red blooms spear through some spring.
Quiet as rows of white stone—
returning bulbs, rows planted wrong season, heads down.
Some numbers: 11/11/11; 21 (years not at war); 86,600,000 (deaths in I&II)—always come down
to one & one & one & will
until Ground demands ploughshares,