Shelves
I like best the ones that change: Elephant. Tiger. Bear.
Old books on the shelves reflecting every self I’ve ever been.
The boy who thought he’d do much better to the man who got fired for correcting his boss.
The trips to the zoo and the trips to Europe and the trips back home during midterms where I carried the books in cardboard boxes up staircases to rooms that were long ago abandoned.
I’ve outgrown this old house and want to let my old selves breathe. I can’t stand to leave them stacked on the shelves.
Or in boxes.
I open the small ones last and count the contents.
I recount them later because if one went missing it would leave a hollow space.
Relentless
Memory is the enemy.
Memory is a persistent beggar with an opiate dependency
And cigarette holes in the upholstery.
Memory is a slippery slope and a jammed clutch,
Always trying to drag you back to a place
That was once home.
Memory is a lonesome god.
Memory is a false bottom, a trap door,
A trick candle that embarrasses you
Every year on your birthday.
Memory is a neon sign you can see
From every highway you’ve ever driven.
Memory is the rabid dog outside your work.
Memory is a wayward soothsayer.
Memory is a casket with a peephole.
Memory is a clock that weeps.
Memory is a self-loathing prophecy with cracked lips,
Begging for another pull
Of the past—and her dizzy Oracle,
Dagger pressed against my chest,
Demanding recompense for every tomorrow
I thought I’d never see.
The Old Ones Claim…
A rainforest changes the man,
It changes the woman.
Some were born with rivers
In their blood. Their ancestors
Spoke to raven and bear,
Spoke to wolf and otter and black fish,
Spoke to salmon and eagle and frog and heron.
You speak to them, too,
And they talk back. Sometimes
You’re close to grasping what they say—
That’s one way the rainforest
Changes you.
One day at dusk a bear
Walks through the eye
Of the camera.
The old ones claim
A man lives inside a bear;
You tell no one
A bear lives inside a man.
There are weeks in the forest
When your whole body is
A word even you can’t utter
But the trees, in their
Deep listening,
Hear.
Lost to Pain
Long ago, when I was wordless and alone, what I did know of the face I held to the mirror of my mother, how space became a feature, a form, an artifice between us.
Even now as I remember the face lost to pain, then madness, then painlessness to fire
I see the ghost I made and unmade like a bed. I hear her in the kitchen, sleepless, when I wake at night and words are far away.
And when they come, if not the words then voices, glances, cries. I call them hers. The ones she’s lost to pain, then madness. I call and because dawn burns for those it mourns and in returning turns away, I enter a gallery of animate objects where everything is dead and moving. The doll with its string. The mechanical arm. The beaded curtain.
They are artifacts of what is here and not quite here, not quite adventure or farewell, words bereft of animals to speak them.
The primordial mass cultured with light.
The slightest seizure more terrible than stillness. I call and I enter the space with two lone heads—the first with its bright complexion: the other bluish grey—and although bound together by their hair, they do not face each other and when they move, the bright one says yes. The dark one says no and the theatre is cold as x-rays are and absurd French movies, the kind my mother hated like madness and pain.
Like all who live and do not live, who unearth a self so abstract the person disappears, these abject gestures toward a deeper recognition are stilted, callous, masked as shamans who, as beasts, are never original but ancestral beyond words. I talk to my mother still.
And what she says lives in the ways the talking heads and shamans never do. I loved her. And thus the phantom space between us where words crossed in tiny boats with pieces of spirits who stepped ashore. In the gallery of animate objects, I hear the ocean in the breathing machine, the mother’s inconsolable refusals in the blue grey of can’t and no. I hear the horrors of her late age in the jaw, in raw shock and provocation, the ah they open and in the phantom speech she gave, before she knew I loved her, when I was wordless and alone.
Co-dependency
Your words sound like my grandmother’s now
She speaks with her dead voice from your vocal cords
The sharp vowels try to pin my conscience
Strong consonants devalue my power
The words themselves leak resin—
Wife and children—escape her teeth
Trying to catch me she cannot understand
I don’t want either.
Her pyramid scheme
Of love is ancient. She drives to me
With prayer and I turn her away with fire.
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