petals and bees

I asked him

how do you pray

             knees on floor thigh from thigh and from out of the negative space does your prayer speak

because for me it is this unquiet silence in the calamity

when I have finally turned to look squarely at my complacency

at my complacency which is a swinging vacancy sign and the mattress where the

molestation happened which is a figure of speech but not thick or full figured yet

because a complacent life is underdeveloped and quite frankly

unsexy

when I am in a state of grace I am talking about the usual

sex, life, death or whatever it is that makes the crown of one’s head light up

(consider all of this as me giving back what I just borrowed by saying that)

I was ashamed when death invited me to dance

             to be so intimate with my spirit

lest I see it for what it is when naked and unburdened

                        not immortal

lest I see it for what it can so effortlessly do :

                        animate experience

it was a different kind of love making because when I came

             I shouted out loud the question-answer:

                        why is it hard to be animal and creator simultaneously

to make some thing full of beauty

it is the beauty

that gets me

every

time

I finished contextualizing my question

and he answered in song :

take me back to when everything felt so good and so right everything felt so good and so right

every thing felt so good

so good and

so right in the eternal now every thing felt             so good and

so right

Unlike the student who can explain why cylinder A is passive,

While cylinder B is gaseous and reactive –

You can hold Love and Grief up to the light and still

Not know how to extract one from the other –

Omit cause and effect because life is rhetorical  –

In one moment, you are seduced like the trees in a sun-choked grove –

Up to your throat in warmth and punchy under the spell

Of an untranslatable Exaggeration, which makes the world

Read aloud like a tender erotic, tragicomic letter addressed to you –

What will you write back, in correspondence with this place?

For that is all it is, your being here in feeling and in thought –

Observe the saplings, vertical in their youth, binding together over time –

Branches snaking around the waists of their leaned on neighbors –

Much like us, in spite of our best feigned efforts to remain unattached –

How you choose to live is one way of writing meaning into the margins –

Where you answer with love and are changed by grief.

How to be: holy

When your throat is full of lint

Or whatever it is that falls off of words

In the heat of a moment –

All that your conversation wears is

Nothing compared to an inadvertent glance.

Don’t say mercy, only

Become a vase, glazed and full-figured,

Arrange in it the mums, freesia, stock,

Bearded Iris; now deliver this

To yourself, to others: is it possible to

Quiet your need to be seen and heard,

By yielding, in softness, with your eyes?

Give up your ears for a short while –

(This is an action that you become, are not decorated by)

Make out of your gesturing a gentle candor, and of posture –

An invitation to be heard: how to be holy.

Who at one point in time crouched over miniatures,

On a shag rug that stood in for grass,

Playing out life, story after implausible story;

Now only the size of things has changed

So you can no longer hold the plot pieces in your hands.

Somewhere along the yarn you became the villain and the deliverer

With only a shower curtain between the two, or so it feels

Because of how vulnerable a footloose imagination can be,
Crouched in flesh over your own limbs, standing in for toys,

Making memoir with much greater consequence.

A poet elucidates what song imitates, where love labors, and

Beauty may very well be antecedent:

Namely, a minor rearranging of some major functions

So that you feel with your bones and think from the spirit and

Your five senses go about the others business; better known as nonsense,

Better known as Wonder, which no man or woman can make sense of.

There are places in a woman you never hear speak

Until the embrace of thought and body, when

What is felt in her is heard by him as distinctly

Were she a flute carrying just the one note,

Ribbon-like, pure and untranslatable.

When you can taste with your eyes and listen with your hands you become

A kind of contortionist, a marvelous lover, a poet –

Someone who spends the better part of their life chasing after ways

To explain the phenomenon of passion to the flautist who condescends

To the lover, dancer and poet at once with a single phrase, ghostly and solvent,

Commanding your net income of sorrow to be reckoned with that very moment –

To move, one must be malleable and come alive.

I used to eat Holy Communion on Sundays.

I stopped that nonsense not long after

I put an end to thumb sucking and began

To meditate and eschew attachment

Like the dry and high-browed adult I was becoming.

We take to any creed because to not do so would be

Closed minded or open minded depending on

Several hard facts of your cultural biases but

Now I ask for your bare-skinned alliance.

I request only greed and goodness.

When I abandoned Buddhism, at the time I could not

Tell mediation from the rosary (but mostly I

Wanted to be violently in love again).

So I attached to him and him to me

And suffered deliberately.

I choose passion over denial, these days –

I still fill my incompleteness with the ways

Of ritual and touch and word like

How light takes shape in a voluminous world;

A woman’s way is not of the Lord.

It is in her ancient nature to desire,

And desire is its very own Tao, or temple.

Just as the haiku that calls on wind, pierce and bone

To speak for that which cuts, breaks and has no home –

Suddenly the soul, a calcified decanter, the first winter rain,

Pours out its cold, hard and immeasurable contents.

Was rear-ended by an elderly man who pulled over only after she laid on the horn-

He called her a feisty bitch so she tried to run him over.

He threatened to call the cops: go ahead you fucking asshole. Her words.

This is the woman who pushed me out of her womb

With the same rage I was once afraid of after each slammed cabinet.

I have carried it with me over the years, like a thoughtless stammer:

The guilt that if my mother could do it over again I might not be here –

Most likely because she would be discovering ancient cities under the sea

Or teaching art on a reservation in Utah, voting red and

Never once believing in God but instead, she had me:

Expending all her greatness patching holes in the wall

Where I kicked, introducing me to the world

With the shake of a Huckleberry branch and

Allowing my small self to believe every piece of obsidian was a rare artifact.

I saw the panic of passion in the bloodstains on her unwashed

Red vest from a time she pulled a man out of a vehicle at the scene

Of a collision. Vigorous woman, always highly flammable in my eyes and

Blitzing down the highway. The kind of volatile that makes your heart charge

Towards your intestines: she took to mothering with the metal jaw of a lifer.

I think the day is coming when she won’t know who I am because of how

The cancer treatment poisoned her memory – everything is marginalized over time. 

It is apt that my mother would enter old age thundering on the double-edged leviathan of madness and forgetfulness.

You can start with the rare,

Felt sense of luminosity

Flickering in your bowels

And give it a place in the forest:

A lake of light off the path

Pooling up to your knees

Until they give out at the honor.

This is also known as the

Poetic command of ventriloquism

Let me explain if I can, how

The forest [poem] is quiet until

The pain of pleasure itself drums like

The Bird, going crak-crak-crak

At the soul to find residency, or food,

Or to make life from these wooden words,

Pecked deliberately on the page.

Weary, for lack of tenderness –

Like pillars of granite, each one of us impassible!

We lack that desperate quality tenderness.

It is a roaring lion hiding behind softness

In the kingdom of our hearts, because both

Belong to a full-bodied display of love.

Tenderness leads us to the ladle of Susceptibility

Sensual and iridescent –

If we taste, we die quick and marvelous

If we don’t taste, we die – only later, upright and cold.

To be human is to not know what is good for us

But to think otherwise –

Tenderness is thoughtless and I bow to that

Unprotected quay where

Shame, akin to fear, becomes obsolete, as does the

Gatekeeper, troll, demon – our fastidious will

Which fastens our hearts to the granite pillar.

Tenderness makes us alive

To a primal neediness, our clumsy condition –

I need you: what tender, silken words,

Flight of birds, ascending vine, courier of love!

May whatever is left of our collective compassion,

     Whatever we haven’t rolled the stone over

          Or exiled deep within our spirit, or

      Leashed to the pillar for fear of free exchange,

May the gamble of you surrendering to me –

Be gathered in by the worn out and weary ends

And wrung desperately; for we

Need to need one another in a new way.