Praying

On Sunday, I open up the house

to let in the June morning

to ease cobwebs from the empty rooms,

to efface dreams

adhering to the surfaces.

The weather—

of late, inimitable oppression—

has broken, and at last

we have a little serenity.

At noon, the hour of baptism,

the bed is stripped of its clothes—like a woman

praying for her old voluptuousness.

I wash the sheets in cold water

laced with lavendar and mint,

hiding thyme in bunches in the mattress

to conceal the taste of sleep

and mad dreaming.

I make a breakfast of mango slipped

from the flesh, orange water, cheese

& bread sprinkled with oils & thyme,

sweet plums. All day,

I do not speak a word.

One afternoon (or many of them),

I spent hours just sun worshipping.

It was easier than dreaming, you

could come away with a cleaner feeling.

The liquid of sunshine in the veins

was clarity.

Every so often, tempted by the suggestion of being born,

I stand naked in sun,

reminding myself of distant pilgrims who

prayed to the air or sang

their parched hymns to some tranquil god.

I search for him in the dazed clover,

my fingers grazing sound,

the tender in the long grass, all summers

distilled and scattered  through these empty rooms.

I am praying, praying.

Derelict--a poem for summer

DERELICT

I.

I was on 7^th Street;

a troop of boys was riding ahead of me, their backs

blazing in light,

small lit men full of air,

their t-shirts billowing behind them

like their swelling lungs,

as though they would restrain

or guide them—

it is the same thing.

At 4 in the afternoon

the sun could collide at just the angle

with the facade of the derelict building beside us,

half a blown-out wing —just

dissolved:

A blind man in sunlight.

Its bewildering joy in that moment,

as it stood in sun, the carved interior of its lungs

gasping in air

was enough to split the heart.

II.

He came back from his brief sojourn

at the institution

slightly derelict, like a rock tossed and left in the sun.

I could see from here

his crystalline lungs expanding

beautiful and raw in the breaking.

He muttered apologies and confessions

too desolate to fully sound them.

Unbelievably whole in body,

his remaining architecture might have stood as

only a testament to past,

a remnant.

You never think you’re going to witness

the ruin of another human being.

Sunlight and chords fractured

in the crystal prism of his lungs

remind you that he was human.

III.

On my desk, a small piece of sea glass

occupies a corner with the shells

that I stole from a beach in Florida,

one of those summers I trolled sand for a single

jeweled semicircle, edges

raised and grainy with the lapping salt:

The carelessly halved base

of something gathered in glassy waves

slowly disintegrating

among my books and shells.

At times, boys up the street ride past

on their bicycles, or pause to carry

small burdens to each other,

their dialects lost on the June air

as I watch from up the street.

They are remnants of me

looking for shells or grasping listlessly

at walls dissolving

in air and sunlight. I try to gather some

of the crystalline fragments in my hands.

In the afternoon,

salt drifting across the table,

I glean a few discordant shards,

charged with surreptitious and bewildering light.

The Names on the Wall

What is left for us to say to you,

names etched on glass?

names etched on our crudely living hearts?

We are tirelessly living between your twin lights,

insisting on your memory,

insisting on our modal chant

“Remember,

Never forget.”

You speak in names,

“We are the dead,”

repeating name by name,

your dread, calm memoriam.

Again, and again,

a rhythm for America,

a drumming rhythm to our silence,

the meter of our renewable grief,

beneath these beacons and your shining pools.

                                                            In Memoriam

                                                                           9/11