for Cherrie
The spoon he lifts to her lips
holds a sun, the soup
I made from memory.
Around the table as we eat,
our arms touch.
We hold her in this net.
She is waiting to climb
into earth
where her room waits,
where the clocks are set
to a different hour,
and many are called,
and many chosen.
She will rise and climb
into the sky,
become a sparrow
with sorrow in her beak,
she will be lamp and shadow
in our empty houses,
will lie down
in the loneliness of stars.
We will search the night for her,
our faces shining, bewildered moons.
The child begs for the same story
night after night. She waits
beneath the white-starched sheet
in her bed beside the window, full open
to the caught air,
unstirred leaves of the mimosa.
She pulls the sheet to her face,
sniffs its clean,
and waits for her mother to come,
open the book, and begin.
Beneath the telling, her mother’s voice,
the child wonders why
the old woman cut the tongue
of the sparrow
fluttering among the bamboo,
and so in her days, the child
sings for the bird.
She sings to the old woman
and believes the magic in her singing
will turn the old woman
gentle and sane.
She sings
after her mother closes the book
and rises without kiss or touch
and descends the stairs
of her madness.
The child cups her hands,
breathes onto the sparrow
and holds it to her chest
when the mother’s rage
sends her hiding under the bed,
into the night of the closet,
or high in the downy
blossoms of the mimosa,
and the little common bird
quickens its breath
until calmed in the curl of her fingers.
Always she vows
to protect the bird.
She strokes the timid head,
feels the heat of its sides
on her cheek
and sings, believing
that the song, if sung perfectly
over many days and nights,
will lift her mother
from the black room of her mind,
will lead her into light.
The child grew old
watching her parents remake the world.
They looked into her eyes and told her
what she saw did not happen,
as though in a moment the moon
turned its back,
leaves clambered up from the dirt
and locked themselves to the tree,
as though petals scattered by night’s rain
retook their places as the rose.
All the things that did not happen
collected in the dark place
beneath her bed
and entered her dreams as she slept.
Someone calling and calling,
her father, alone in a village far away,
whose name she counted
on the fingers of her small hands,
whose heart she held in the cup
of her small heart,
the father who whispered like wind
among the silken blossoms
of the mimosa,
The journey, child,
will be long
.
Beyond hills, and shadow,
on the other side of the rain,
girl who tumbled
from God’s coat pockets
into their hands, their need, the barren
ground of their love,
I promise you
this journey will be long,
your true home another country
between morning and despair,
between trespass and grace.
Child, speak your truth.
There is no night
that you were not first born into.
There is no sky
that is not already inside you.
I lay down at night and wakened
to the darkening of the world.
Beneath a sky of slate I chant
the liturgy of autumn, light
grown weary after its toil
of ripening, coaxing
the myriad blossoms open,
the wheat to turn to gold.
I read the gospel according to trees.
It says:
Give away
all that you have,
make yourself destitute, bereft,
but first you must become as fire
.
This is the first lesson.
From childhood I learned
the proverbs of rain
and of her sister, grief,
the frail pages stiffened
from weather:
Grief can drown you.
Rain returns all things to earth
.
This is the second lesson.
Once there was a child,
someone’s daughter.
She folded her grief
into paper boats,
sent them out on the water.
She folded her tears
into paper birds
and let them fly from her hands
into the rain-dark sky.
The birds had eaten the path
to her lost father.
She left bits of bread wherever she walked,
that he might come.
She held the last crust in her fist,
and when she slept she tucked her fist
beneath her pillow.
She named him Wind. Starry Night.
She named him Rain on Parched Ground.
She prayed a small girl’s prayer.
She made him into light, a candle
that flickered and made shadows of itself,
and she recited the parable
of light:
There was once a love made manifest
in a crust of bread
crushed in a child’s fist.
Eat, child, eat,
that you become as flame
.
I lie down at night and name the darkness.
You didn’t know, my Father, you didn’t know
the years of my hunger.
My fingers curled around you.
I held you under my pillow
near the compass of my heart,
north star of my longing.
So much I keep there still:
the frayed scarf of your voice,
the curious little birds of your eyes,
mountains, rivers, the creased
and faded map
I didn’t know I carried.
I lie down and hear the wind
sing its hymn to the dying light,
unlock the leaf from the tree,
fray the tattered cloth of the sky.
Give away all that you have
, it sings.
Take your grief into your hands,
bless it, plant it in the earth.
And there will come a living thing, born
of soil, and rain.
It will bud and blossom
.
This, the final lesson:
the parable of the astonished heart.
This hummingbird
will not die again;
your careful hands
have made him as though alive,
and all the birds come
to pay him homage.
You have placed him
in the hand of the Xian warrior
who is finished now, with battle
and spends his days
listening for wind’s song
in the great bell
of the sky,
and keeps watch over his garden,
noting the changing face
of the moon, intimate
with her darker
and lighter moods.
He has grown gentle, this warrior,
and the bird, not afraid at all,
waits, quiet in his fist
so that the throat, colour of claret,
catches the afternoon light.
Like the last blossom of autumn,
this smallest of birds
has wakened his heart.
And God stirs,
always,
in the waking heart.
1.
Where Are You, O Mother?
I suffer apparitions. Ecstasy.
Endless centuries
of grief.
Day and night
the lion moon
circles, finding nothing
to eat.
2.
Incomprehensible and without Beginning
My cities of memory.
Mysterious astronomy
of the rose.
Compass
of the universe.
3.
Trisagion
I am the crumbed table
on which the dishes
have yet not been cleared.
I thirst as the mouths
of leaves.
Wolf hunger
of the newly born
is mine.
4.
Celebration
Geraniums in bloom
on the balconies
of Buenos Aires.
Mediterranean blue
seen from the caves
of Patmos.
Vincent’s weeping yellows.
5.
Four Elements
Scarlet: Picasso’s Guernica.
Blue: Saskatchewan flax.
Gold: The hair of the sun.
Purple: Sky behind the racing moon.
6.
Joyous Light
Always, somewhere, the sun
is a burnt sienna.
Chants of the desert monks
in the earliest hours of dawn.
The rattlesnake praying,
curled on ancient stone.
7.
My Heart Trembles
A nomad, I walk
the shifting dunes
of Tamagesh.
Caravans pass. What loneliness —
their moaning wheels,
their belled herds.
The famine wind
flees through the trembling
doors of houses and of windows
frozen in their depressions.
The dead, underground, breathing.
8.
Have Mercy upon Us
The chained and unchained.
Factory workers. Skin
on bone.
Those who must drink mud.
Cellists, poets,
and the architects of mourning.
9.
Therein Remember
Those who have fallen
asleep. Saturn.
Jupiter.
Dear little Pluto, who has never
awakened.
How far to the end
of the universe.
What lies beyond.
10.
Nurtured in Love
St. Gregory’s fowl. Its feelings
toward the dove.
The dog who nurtured
a fawn, made a sacred space
on its bed.
How children in the streets
of Luanda, Saõ Paulo, Chicago
break a cracker into equal portions.
11.
Woe Is Me
If only I could die
for you.
12.
Be Delighted
The cicada’s anthem.
Women carrying fruit on their heads.
The slow undress of autumn.