Whether anything survives kenosis, beyond keening, breaking apart even
xylem, draining fluids until even wood weeps.
Yet more. Yet poppies & bloodgrounds.
Zenith, n. The peak at which lesson spears ground, unshredded, blooms.
Bield (noun), shelter or home. Archaic.
Disorderly Abecedarian 4: Calendar
November courts martyrs—birds die, women exhaust themselves.
Xylology: The study of wood, not trees. Study of corpses, not being
torn from corpses. Hagiography: Writing the corpse.
March & May—the only month-names meaning something more. Well, August.
Grating, grunting, each day does both.
Zephyr my heart, three-weathered day, keep
January—the old year’s corpse lingers,
elements disbursing into crystals, into “ask
wooden-heart, the puppeteer, ask what to make.”
Can I leave? The house’s layers of air
keep thinning. The closer layers
have their own hands.
September resurrects the year, which leaves its tomb, a
bundle of fetid rags and empty pages.
December binds the pages.
October’s had breath to write. It will all
revisit the place where the grave re-opened, no
love safe, no longer named.
Yes, someone can leave, something’s
unbound, something of
value, like a pebble on a headstone, not exactly gem, not
quite growth, not quite quiet.
August’s the witch-furnace—stirring the huge pot
in the fire the air keeps feeding.
February brings nothing to the table.
Put each in its own booth to wait.
Xylology (noun), the study of wood.
Proper Abecedarian 4: Ferguson
August & its burning done. Come snow. Come winter, come
bundling. Yet burning—cities and the shuttered bodies of black humans.
Can black not be the darkness of white hearts? Can
December be instead Waiting-upon-unfearable-births,
elementary un-killing, elementary un-beating, on allchildren children of light?
February & its raised hands. Black lives matter. Raised signs. Black lives
grate against white fear & their own. Black lives
halved, quartered—thrown at, thrown out, thrown against, thrown
in like feed for the caged.
January & its already-failures, its surrendered bodies, its MLK birthday, its wounds
kept new-open, uncleansed, unclosed.
La, la, la they had it coming (all of every year). La, li, la. . .
March with its raised fists or switches—any March.
November with its thanks/no-thanks, with Tamir Rice (12-years old) police-shot dead.
October with its fallings & departures—any October.
Put the gunsfistsswitches down. Raise the bodies not
quite grown, not quite men, not light enough to save.
Revisit all the violent graves of bodies lightly accounted.
September with its raised belt & sit down, shut up—any September.
Torn. This poem between tact & mouths of sharks, this poem
unbound from nothing. This poem white. This poem without body. This poem without
value against a raised hand. This poem raises its hand, fisted around nothing
wooden, leather, metal. This poem speaks
xylology—the study of trees, which stand, which rise like black bodies singing:
Yes, we matter. Yes, we voice. Yes, we are trees, tall even when cut down. This poem
zephyrs its ungentled breath across the bad years, praying.
Disorderly Abecedarian 5: Blasphemy
Blaspheme: To peel an orange with a hammer—
mantle the ground in blood say the tree is not the mountain.
Polytheist: Dog who loves more than its master, a single child of two parents.
Xenial prohibitions: Do not offer up your children to guests.
Holy: A thing diminished by speech.
Deify = or ≠ defy.
Love = or ≠ deify.
Explain any of this to a broken heart,
god of breaking, god of blood, god of teeth, god of buds.
Omen = or ≠ Oh, men. Amen:
unmanageable—the wings propelling air into lungs,
crux of being = breath.
Negate = or ≠ negotiate, novitiate, neophyte.
Ken this: Ken that I long for bird song, ocean crash, sky-widening
revealing largenesses.
Infidel: To peel an orange with a saw, mantle ground in blood,
flout songs of birds and mammals of the seas & wind in trees.
Sex is the wings of everything that moves the earth—
quill with which maps are drawn,
abundance counted & laid down, laid up into
ziggurats, to hang like gardens upon
twittering of trees, upon
wind’s word—
very song from very song—
year spooling into year, green with longing,
just inside the orange’s skin.
Xenial (adjective), hospitality to strangers.
Proper Abecedarian 5: Oranges
Abundance: an orange so fragrant it’s
blasphemy not to roll it in your hands until they’re pregnant with oils; scent
crucial to your belief in senses of Christmas.
Deifying your own hands, everything comes back to Christmas,
explaining the scent of oranges as the origin of your theology, your
First-Cause. It could just as easily have been the taste of butter, or light you called
God mazing its way through loblolly needles, rubbing the flaked bark,
holy as pushing needles in-and-out of fabric, the promise you made to read Anne Frank.
Infidel: who uses a knife on an orange rather than
just letting its