Three Poems

Good Friday

It’s always a half-buried thing, like a ship or a body or mythology, with only a few toes exposed and the tip of an antler, a sail. Something lost in the earth or in the sea. Something lost in the body. Usually, it takes up the whole house. There’s never a diagram, but someone tries to articulate it.

Some bodies are better at this than others. Some corporations, some families. This was her name. This was his name. No one talks much about the flesh, only the names, as if the names were stories.

My students write falling over and over again. In the essay about the divorce, the heart machine, the terrible timing, she writes like falling through a trapdoor.

It’s not a day of catastrophe, of sudden, fatal reversal, of taking apart the whole damned thing. Golden light on the morning chimneys, on the late windowsills. As if the angle of light in the afternoon were a state of blessedness.

The body, half blood, half syntax. Subject, predicate, but the grammar is mostly too troubling. At the throat, the arthrologies collect and tangle. You need a magician, a metaphysician to diagram it. And, why, when you lock the bandha at the base of the throat, does the space above the crown open?

“Even if your preferred mode is fragment, you need syntax to love.”

Gods are made of many things. Water, trembling, widening light. Heavy hands. Desire. The language for gods, weighted down with yarny, thorny matter, ropes and kelps and growths that drag all the way to the ocean floor, wrap around many limbs along the way.

You can buy sturdy shoes and use walking sticks and guardrails and lines and you can test your footing until you’re no longer moving. You can stay out of the houses that have doors that drop you quickly between dimensions, skins.

We always needed so much forgiveness.

Always swimming hard against the dark of the drums, the dark of the prayers and chants, the visible syntax of the unseen. Then one night stained glass folds over the body like three leaves.

Balasana As a Means of Travel

The whole evening in child’s pose. You’ll never have this child’s pose again. It’s broken, tender here, the whole room clamoring for breath.

There are versions of this story that go like this: the child jilted the mother, the mother jilted herself, or something jilted them both. These stories don’t end in miracles. That’s the effect of stopping a story partway—no miracles.

She used to say everyone knows everything. She meant a kind of universal intelligence, psychic collectivity, all the machines communicating. She meant it’s your fault if the car won’t start.

Sometimes we sat on the curb in the city and talked while we waited. Sometimes it seemed like the curbs were moving, or time was pooling around our ankles in the gutters, or hanging like a net in the city trees.

Children make time move differently, minutes, afternoons.

I don’t remember living there with you. What I remember is being on bicycles, what I remember is being in a car halfway to Bangor, struggling to keep awake. What I remember is being in a car halfway home from Atlantic City, struggling to keep awake. Film credits disappearing up the windshield like turning on the defrost.

There is an absence where the house should be. Too many people who have quit using my name.

The song about what everybody knows has six verses, has 44 variations. He could have gone on. Honey, hon.

I looked for wonder in the wide night of December and wished into being something like a light. It was made of all the stillness of the drained-out season.

In the end, most of the violence was at her own hand.

It was always my car, except those times when it was his. That was before we lived in cars, when coherence still got us from place to place. We lived better days—the house so square, so retrievable, the heat pouring out onto the street, all 75 degrees.

Daylight Savings

Time to move a fragile thing as far as possible, schoolyard egg carry gone Olympic or turning the planets by hand on a miniature solar system model, earnestness of wire and fingers and painted foam.

Ecosystems do not need our enthusiasms, our second winds.

When you die God will call upon you to account for all the permitted pleasures you did not enjoy while on earth.

Charles Street hung with paper lanterns and temporary festival lighting but it rained all weekend.

So many things happen in childhood it’s hard to name them. There’s always a drainage ditch or a creek or culvert or sewer, something that disappears into the earth, which has implications for the way time passes in the afternoon.

Sand foundations and vinyl siding, department of forgetting. So many houses empty.

There they spoke in the language of family—a form of expression that is both more direct and more ruthless than social and public speech.

Nothing distilled or fortified or characterized, particularly, about the winds that blew through the stripmalls. There were developments. They grew quickly.

Or getting fully lost four blocks from home, really exiting the map. The hollow veins of things under the ground, a promise of secrecy, or visible analogues for that sense that so many things are hidden.

Divorce, he said, it’s like walking around without your eggshell. We didn’t know him; he was just our teacher in his parachute hiking pants.

Already the sense that the world was so big, so many houses, so quickly moving, that it may not matter who you live next door to. One spring, you quit asking.

The technology of memory, not its content, but its actual shape, its mechanism, formed along these channels, filiation, these creases, ditches, like mineral deposits, or kicking a stone and following it and kicking it and following it because of the way the sun feels and the day.