Excerpt from "In His Own Shadow"
"He reads:
While all bodies share
the same fate, all voices do not."
"Have You Prayed"
"When the wind
turns and asks, in my fatherās voice,
Have you prayed?
I know three things. One:
Iām never finished answering to the dead.
Two: A man is four winds and three fires.
And the four winds are his fatherās voice,
his motherās voice . . .
Or maybe heās seven winds and ten fires.
And the fires are seeing, hearing, touching,
dreaming, thinking . . .
Or is he the breath of God?
When the wind turns traveler
and asks, in my fatherās voice,
Have you prayed?
I remember three things.
One: A fatherās love
is milk and sugar,
two-thirds worry, two-thirds grief, and whatās left over
is trimmed and leavened to make the bread
the dead and the living share.
And patience? Thatās to endure
the terrible leavening and kneading.
And wisdom? Thatās my fatherās face in sleep.
When the wind
asks,
Have you prayed?
I know itās only me
reminding myself
a flower is one station between
earthās wish and earthās rapture, and blood
was fire, salt, and breath long before
it quickened any wand or branch, any limb
that woke speaking. Itās just me
in the gowns of the wind,
or my father through me, asking,
Have you found your refuge yet?
asking,
Are you happy?
Strange. A troubled father. A happy son.
The wind with a voice. And me talking to no one."
"A Hymn to Childhood"
"Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didnāt last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?
The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?
The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.
And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your motherās china.
Donāt fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.
Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.
Which childhood?
The one from which youāll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and donāt know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling at morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming."
"Trading for Heaven"
"I saw you at the top of the stairs.
Now I live a secret life.
I saw you holding open the door.
Now Iām filling pages with
things I canāt tell anyone.
Now Iām more alone than Iāve ever been.
I traded every beyond, every someday,
for heaven in my lifetime. Now Iām dying
of my life. Now Iām alive
inside my death.
Do you see the space between our bodies?
Barely a hand, hardly a breath,
it is the space mountains and rivers are made of.
It is the beginning of oceans, the space
between
either and
or, both and
neither,
the happiness of forgetting
our names and the happiness of hearing them
for the first time. I heard you
singing yourself to sleep.
It was a song from both of our childhoods.
And now I donāt know if singing
is a form of helplessness,
Timeās architecture revealed,
or some inborn motive all blood
and breath obey
to enact a savage wheel.
I found you at dawn
sitting by the open kitchen window.
You were sorting seeds in a plate.
And if you were praying out loud,
Iāll never tell.
And if you were listening to the doves,
and if their various whoo-ing, and coo-ing,
and dying in time,
are your earliest questions blown back to you
through the ragged seasons,
and if youāve lived your life
in answer to those questions,
Iāll never tell.
Your destiny is safe with me.
Your childhood is safe with me.
What you decide to bury is safe with me."
Excerpt from "Descended from Dreamers"
"Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in a which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.
He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.
Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged."
"Bring Home Her Name"
"Whose house is this? Nobody knows.
Birds flying in and out of every window
all year long and doors swinging wide
in the wind both ways, toward the glow
of an imagined past, and toward the bride,
that fleeing girl, the future. She hides
by changing, escapes by standing still.
The secret of possession? Go outside.
Sheāll come to rest inside you. Leave your will.
Meet your dark lender, Evening, below the hill.
Her father, heāll tell you her name.
Then youāll ransom the hours and heart you spent
playing house on property lent,
taste her name and for what your life is meant."
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