At last, terminal 2, we coalesce in feverous impatience, silent
but for the clasping hands, the fluorescent buzz that limns
our murmurous, furrowed brows in insomniatic violets.
Hours early, we sip coffee and knit our fingers in delicate
waiting, the mother winding circles around the vending
machines and luggage carts. Lowers herself onto a bench
and instantly rises, as though unable to bear the stillness.
Grips a wilt of carnations in febrile fist.
At 9:02 the first passengers tumble from the one-way
doors, their parous interstice a dire glimpse of maybe’s,
strangers who emerge in lieu of her children.
The sussurous crests of anxiety and pinched breath
churn into unconscionable waves of panic – every
four seconds the frantic illume of her telephone, though she knows
there’s no one to call, no hope but the screen
blinking “Abuja – CDG – carousel 3” and the endless
procession of voyagers – at first a harried rush of suitcases
and now an arrhythmic metallic shudder that closes
on unbearable quiet. Riveted to the railing, leaned over
as if she could dive right through the doors
and carry her flock straight home. I mutter something
about border checks and lost luggage, the mundane litany
of possible delays, lay a hand on her arm as if it could
assuage anything. And finally neither of us speak
only fix ourselves on the fraught horizon, the fear rising
to unspeakable peaks – is it possible they
never boarded the plane, could they be lost in the dedalian
corridors somewhere beneath the white arc tracing its vital
path across the flight map, has a despotic badge barred them
this final border ? And just as I’ve turned to ask
the guard to let us pass – a visceral shriek shatters
the air in electric relief – she’s dodged the barrier
so swiftly you’d believe it was never there, runs
to the girls blinking in the rutilant dawn, begins
to weep as she grasps them finally – then sweeps the eldest
into the air, and she lands so softly – as though
she’d only flown a breath above where her mother
stands now, clasped endlessly to her hair and her dress.
Body is a blade
Though I awake as pure as a chalkboard
newly erased, I know I must have dreamed
another war. Memory’s dauntless glacier
plunged sapphire tusks into the black hull
of sleep, which diffused a carmine ether through
each ribboned channel and stirred me
to life, sputtering up the slush and blood
of what must have come before-
In the kitchen, swift as a dove the colour of forget,
my hands vigorous on the coffee pot and stiff bread
stubborn against my teeth. In the bathroom,
one by one, I yank the turgid leeches from my hair,
spit scarlet clots from vituperative throat
and find clues as to the shape of nocturne’s wound.
There are no words in my young clutch of language
that do not conjure him. My weathered favorites
so often in service to our beauty, I observe,
now, with the frigid solemnity of an auditor
come to measure the turn of the world. Whether the basest lights
still illume as commanded, if there is still time
to root among the detritus and take stock of what may
be saved. I wield my body as a blade and fell
the thickets mindless as graves.
Still, there are days
to catalogue wildflowers, my poetry books and recipes,
heirloom quilts and photo frames, the sweet blush
of cream in a borrowed mug. To note scrupulously
the sentient shock of surprise, the irrepressible bloom of warmth
when someone rests their head on my shoulder.
Sometimes, when I hear a child wail in the train’s narrow twilight
I do not weep into the windowpane, nor smother my face in my scarf, nor weigh
my skull in barren hands.
The thesis defense
At thirteen, he could not have known any more about justiciability and institutional finance
than what he gleaned
from the inevitable tediums of his father’s cumbersome summations.
He must, at some point,
have cringed at the inevitable loom of subjects he could neither grasp
nor budge from the dinner table.
But for two hours, his whole body tensed towards the neat grey suit, the purple socks
crossing and uncrossing beneath the desk
the dauntless pen trembling across his father’s page. What he could not understand, he sensed
from the glittering electric tension :
His face morphed like a cardiogram with every praise and ornate critique thundering in stark
valleys and dithyrambic peaks.
So that when finally the panel rose and draped his father in red, and pronounced
the seethingly-awaited words, he
was the first on his feet and applauded so fiercely that all eyes turned toward his bright relief
and the proud chattering hands,
And joined in the happy noise, though none so earnest as the boy,
nor so soundly heard.
Ligne 8, 17h43
The dull thunk of his cane precedes him : mahogany plod topped
with a wool fedora,
eases himself into the middle metro seat like a crane swaying low
a bundle of sodden lumber.
The ravaged glass raked as a wrist tended to a rain-soaked cat
is constellated with phone lights
and bowed, lissome brows, crowded down with bruised satchels
and burrowed headphones,
while his eyes rove brightly as if on a field trip, amiably curious
as he reads out every station
like a funny word to tumble around the tongue. La Motte-Piquet Grenelle !
He muses, and before I know why,
I tease back, La Potte-Miquet ! And he chuckles brightly, thuds
the rubber stamp of his cane
and heaves his elephantine dignity through the shuttering doors
which just miss the crimson wing of his scarf.
Where music comes from
I woke up with the Book of Love
playing in my mind, as it must have been
in a dream. There’s only one
who could have hummed the tune
in that inviolable, vesperal realm, and so I sit
on our couch, the one I’ve already given up
in the divorce and watch the door
as though he’s only just stepped out
and will be back any minute
to turn the stereo off.
sink
clean velocity
of diminished
mass
sinking
towards its
withered finish
hints of
sharpness
grow
bolder;
in excavation,
the relief
of becoming
less
what I
despise and
more the
obsidian core
that seethes
beneath,
a small god
whose blessing
is a
baited
tongue-
Lady Lazarus
and when he rose, my god how the walls sang
as they collapsed
how I believed for an ephemeral second
they would never entomb again-
Call it grief
or denial, but I don’t
reconcile with the light
which is too strong
on his side of the bed.
Now my hands
linger
on the small dark of his sleep
and long for the whites of his eyes.
Muted acquiescence
I can no longer sense
the vow of his heartbeat nor the meaning
of death
that recedes
like the tide
resurrect
On those improbable, aurulent mornings
when your head lifted to the light
and found the whim to love the sun,
luxuriant reprieve we spent
lingering in the evanescent promise
of relearning the steps to Sunday
markets ripe with vermillion and daffodil,
saying hello to the neighborhood strays,
summiting the pine winding to our door.
Later, we will say,
if the subject should come up.
But prefer to smother the particular snap
of flesh thrashed against the wall
and the requisite battery of phantasmic stomping- the neighbors
in their irate oblivion, aftermath
of such banal catastrophe:
a choreography of keys, sterilized contrition,
and again
in the morning, the fact of your sullen gravity-
On October’s deathbed
I felt kinship with the marigolds
and clementines laid on ephemeral altars
chessmen and sepia,
sweetbread and love letters
to hearken what was
and for one
ineffable darkness,
will become again-
Dimanche au jardin
The old men are gathered
like pigeons around their chessboard
chuckling at the clumsiness
of kings and their own
supposed secret cleverness.
I watch them at a distance,
baffled by the afternoon’s illusory splendor
outraged that anyone could stand
this winter’s austerity without you
your nimble maneuver of marble queens,
your smile to charm the skies
into a sigh of clemency.
I suppose I imagined your absence
an apology on the gate,
the Sunday cravats dispersed
among the peonies, a farewell
till next week, when you’ll return
revel in the aurulent hours
and scowl at the pawns.
I wanted to find you here
or else find no one at all;
without you, who should bother
to wander the courts of Luxembourg
and engage in this kindred warfare.
You’re only a mile away
and yet I mourn the emptiness
shadowed on your place
wish to ask the old men
if they miss you,
wish to bring you home
some news of their fondness.
Beloved,
These voices that scream into my bones the agony of their aloneness, their sweltering rage and their raw fear, they tell me their rosary prayers and cry for a mercy we cannot name. They tell me of their infant too far to touch and their wife lying nameless in the desert sand, they say it’s a matter of time before they kiss each other goodbye through a telephone. I close my eyes and in the stillness I see the dark dragging you away.
“Je vais mourir ici,” she says, and names her children so that I can hear the song in their birth. I keep their letters close, hope’s palimpsests erased and drawn in shades of despondence. They linger by our bedside, vesperal whispers of a thousand living deaths, visions of once-upon homes burned to the earth, and beloved, I have begun to dream of your face in their stead.
There will be a time, beloved, when I kiss you and it will be the very last- maybe I’ll know it, or maybe I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing on the wind to brush my lips like you do. There will be a night when you drift into that final dark, and my arms will falter in holding you close. Maybe I’ll drift asleep easy, the blithe sweetness of your breath holding us afloat, or maybe I’ll spend each second willing my body to keep a trace of your ghost. We have always been unspeakably finite, but at last I can sense the immediacy of this end and beloved, I am breaking-
My greatest selfishness has become this wish to leave our heaven first.
Verse, Virtue, Vices 