iv. Hiroshima
Think of a lit match—
how its head vanishes.
v. Fallout
All light was once matter
and all matter shall become light.
Evening draws me back
into this bedroom, as it did on days we woke
together, when your fingers found the sheet
and pulled it the extra inch to cover
my bare shoulder. The starlings sing
at morning and evening,
the same doorway—sing
though the hollow your hips
carved on the bed has no mass
to hold its shape. I want to be folded whole
into the light that fills your place.
OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE
In the hammock of his robes, she piles roses
like a bounty of heads—
swollen apologies
from the blue cistern of sky.
Why burden a boy with these soft bodies,
washed, like the dead, with rain?
Go, she said, and show no one. I used to keep her
on my kitchen mantel, the spangled
bloom of her body papered around the tall
glass candle, the light-filled mandorla splintering
behind her. As a teen, I had a friend who loved
his faith so much he tattooed her down
the length of his spine, nape
to hip. I watched drops of water star
the corona of her veil as he slid
from the lake at summer camp and told myself
all love was a devotion. Now roses rot
on the side of my house, withered husks
of sparrows I slap
from stems. When I learned remission
was out of reach, I hurled
the candle across the room. A vessel
was all I wanted—beatitude of wax,
axiom of I understand, I intercede, a reprieve
whispered in the dark, where our bodies weigh
as much as rose-scent. Once I massacred
a rosebush, not knowing to cut
above the bud eye,
how each limb feeds
the next like a vein, how the arms
can dry up like rivers, dammed. I slammed
that heavy candle in the trash. It sank
like a full bottle of wine.
Anticlimactic. Cliché. Not enough, I tore
her icon from the wall—the one I lacquered
onto cedar that summer
as a teen. My initials
at the bottom—who was she?
METAPHORS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
1. Cancer:
the typist’s fingers miss a key
on the invite
taking care to bend the brads
she hand-delivers
the manila
upon receipt the President
launches a missile
2. Fission:
her grandmother’s necklace snaps
at the party
freshwater pearls
riot
ricochet
roll
under the sink
down heat shafts
look you’ll never find them all
besides the string is broken
3. Grief:
a fingertip traces the rim
of an empty wineglass
until it
howls
PSALM OF THE ISRAELI GRENADE
Six hundred and thirteen seeds of a pomegranate
are six hundred and thirteen commandments
of scripture singing lead rivets
in the ribs of the enemy. I am the mitzvah arcing
through their open windows hung with thyme.
Into their lemon orchards, chartreuse heads
broken like dandelions
in a hurricane. Centuries shorn to ash
in nanoseconds—a psalm of cinders
over scored land. Each death
sends a chorus of detonations ringing
like rain on the Red Sea. The waves
pass through one another
as ghosts walk
through walls. I want to sing, Father.
Pull the ring of the pin and release me—
a red dove erupting from the cliffside, russet earth
blown heavenward on a burnt
offering of belief. Isn’t that
Your unspoken commandment? A slaughtered ram
at Rosh Hashanah: may we be head not tail.
Not the wailing. Not the carcass
carried through the streets.
But the dark sun
sailing through a kitchen window. The crack
like a pomegranate within a kerchief.
NEWTON’S APPLE
Came to him casually, a wild syllable
of color, a ripe proposition.
Bruised on the grass, a casual reminder
of our entrance on the earth.
Anchored to field, a weight
that tipped the scale,
Eclipsed the sun, the pocket of its blushing
body burnished.
Cleaved his angular thoughts like a joke.
Weighed in the cup of his hand, a mass
of lead, of red, of laughter.
Dropped again to be sure.
Bruised again / again / again /
PRISM
i. Dissection
Morning shatters a water glass, casts
rainbows on formica.
I am not fooled. Don’t try to convince me
any of these are promises. I’ve lost
too much—his curves
immersed in earth while flowers and berries and birds
make use. What could You possibly
offer me now?
An empty glass.
A man pared
into colors. His laughter peeled
away like the skin of an apple.
ii. Black
Priests wear black to tell their flock, I am already dead
and therefore cannot die.
We should all wear black—not only
for mourning. Ashes every day
as protest.
Obsidian that shoulders the quiet
story of fire.
Black like outer space—
the balance of probability between her hips.
I say her because like Eve she does not
obey the law.
She eats whatever she likes.
iii. Death
The prism we pass through.
The nameless blade
that strips us to wavelengths.
Narrow bridge we cross
into the body of another.
iv. White
The science teacher crossed three spotlights on the wall:
green, blue, and red.
My hypothesis was grey. Others
said purple, surely. Or brown.
He darkened the room, slid
each over the other: a triangle of pristine white
light
where they collected.
Explain this, he said.
Not one of us could.
v. Wake
Can light break
or does it, like water, extend
into ocean, conform
to its container, swallow all assaults, never shatter
no matter how many stones
you throw?
vi. Electromagnetic field
I didn’t intend to end up here.
I didn’t mean to go beyond
black and white, our beginning
and his ending, beyond the fence of the visible
spectrum. I find myself wandering, like Hertz and Ritter,
into sound and temperature—other
means of communication.
vii. Others
slide through us:
ossified X-rays d
rift like smoke, the husks
of broken bones. Infrared waves
slither over summer streets. Ultraviolets
singe skin while gammas punch holes
in every cell they find.
They, too, believe in their solitude.
They, too, try to notch
a word into the world.
viii. Waves
It was never my intention to return to the beginning.
Never
to return to this field—
to the bright spring day that followed
his departure. It was here—
right here I trod a path through the tall grass.
It rippled like an ocean
in every direction—hemmed together
where my body passed through.
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF AN OCTOPUS
I gasp when her body ripples from rust
to silver. Her tentacles fumble the mussel
at the edge of the tank. I’ve been
that desperate lately, willing to break
delicate things for hunger’s sake, like the ivory
dishes that recall the years
before we met. How satisfying to split
the discs against patio concrete, to abandon
carloads of furnishings at Goodwill
and imagine my grief tucked in the bags.
Strong emotions cause her to change color
the biologist explains as she transfigures
into a knot of red caught on a twig,
a deflated balloon in a breeze. An octopus
is smarter than a house cat. Her eye
flicks in my direction, every cell hinged
on listening. No exoskeleton means vulnerability.
I press a hand to the glass and her ruddy skin
peppers with white the way my neck
felt like rain each time you grazed it. She heaves
her body over her quarry like a paper lantern
set over a flame. If I could have plucked you
like a mussel from your shell
I would have swallowed you whole.
III
EVE’S APPLE
Became soft, browned flesh—eucharist
dissolved on a tongue where it
Dropped
Bruised among the leaves.
Gnawed by badgers.
Drunk by moths.
Succumbed to hordes of ants ascending in the night.
Filed to a spire of seeds, the rind bending
toward the field.
Illuminated under the crescent moon,
a slender skull
with five narrow eyes.
Tempted away from shape—
Leaned toward sugar, toward myth.
Imprinted on the field, an indented
cup of scent—the urgent press
of her question.
LAW OF INERTIA
A pair of sandals suspended near the front door, the same that walked beside him on the shore, their gold straps worn to grey. Call them artifacts of a woman who died. I’ve left my body far behind since the funeral. Their haphazard stance spells tragedy, waiting for hands to arrive that might cradle them like relics—reverent and ridiculous as this woman here, unable to bury the year-old bag of rice in the garbage pail because his thick fingers once pressed the seal, or to sell the couch where our shoulders and thighs etched the polyester-linen blend. How comfortable we both declared the cushions and how holy it seems now—the padded springs still insist on his shape.
IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
It is impossible to spontaneously create quark from vacuum, but yet it happens all the time.
—DR. MACIEJ LEWICKI
There is an 83.2% probability
webs of mycelium have eaten
your nerve endings
and detritus curls like leaves
in the nest of your aorta. You lie
beside your father, twenty years
and two feet of earth
between. Mary comes every Sunday
to lay flowers and say three words for me.
There is an 11.4% probability
you sit beside your father
outside the dimension of time. He taps
a pipe on his bottom teeth,
takes a pull. Galaxies emerge
from his exhale. Black holes hover
about his head, the bold scent
of tobacco. What is the nature of darkness?
Am I unborn? The words form
but cannot escape before
he opens a book. Thin sheets of scripture
fan in frothy waves of the sea, whales
cascading between his fingers. He grins
and you fall in, your sea-grey
eyes open wide.
There is a 3.6% probability
your body escaped by train, a torn
one-way ticket in your breast pocket.
The carriage rocks
back and forth, bullets over the gold-
green tapestry of countryside at the speed
of light. Your godmother
uses the tip of her finger to mark
your brow with vermilion
as if something entered there. As if
something escaped. You turn
to steam as the train leans
on a curve, leans
into sweetgrass, jasmine,
colors that vanish as you think their names.
There is a 1.79% probability
your blood has given birth to begonias
everywhere it fell: in the woods where you scraped
your knee as a boy, behind the football field
where your mouth tasted his knuckles,
along the dock where ropes cut lines
in your palms. Red lips
chew their way through loam.
They open. They have things to say.
There is a 0.01% probability
you are a great blue whale in the Pacific
culling a seam of morning krill.
You swallow a barrelful, pulse
your larynx like a drum,
surge skyward.
Near the coast of Washington,
a woman wakes, cold
in a strange bed, thinking
she heard your voice.
ELECTRON CLOUD
You tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry.
—ALBERT CAMUS
You could be anywhere—
after all, the hummingbird’s wings
flutter so fast only
a flute of emerald
hovers among the trumpet vines
Even the waspish leaves
hum
like tuning forks
All matter orbits what it adores
*
Think of the blades of a fan—
how they cease
to be blades
and where they escaped
a ring
*
Your palm presses
between my breasts as I unbend
from sleep my blood
begs like ravens
but the bedroom I wake to is empty—
no—
filled with light but the point is
you were here you
could be anywhere
*
Some days I pause by the rotary phone
to spin the letters of your name
winding back time
in the hum and clack
of the wheel—reeling you in
letter
by letter
Never mind
that it’s not plugged in
I swear to god some days
I hear a crackling on the other end
like the time you called from the hospital
still unable to speak
I stood barefoot on the linoleum
&nb
sp; listening to you breathe
even then
I believed
CENTRIFUGAL FORCE
I wait for the fabric
to break—
for a hole to yawn
through the skin—
but paper-thin it spins
and spins the chef’s
hardened hands
have tossed this dough
for years the disc
flutters above
and around him
a Dalí clock falling
and rising with every brush
of his knuckles let no one tell you
grief is a stone
it is supple a plane
beyond moan
stretched past the edge
of the known—
ORIONID METEOR
What you call a shower,
I call fire. I’ve come
this close—
ice and dust and desire
serrated against your cornea.
Friction is a terrible thing.
Trying to touch your face is like singing
as you’re burned at the stake—
a colorful prayer
of conversion—
a flaying
just to glimpse your back.
Your catatonic blue. God-iris
almost in focus. A cold ocean to slake
my incinerating question.
ELEGY IN THE FORM OF ENDANGERED SPECIES
We believe in the seen and unseen—
in blue whales beneath the Strait of Juan de Fuca
gliding like cellos
through silver arteries of salmon
I believed the motel owner who told
of whitecapped waves and a cliff
whales lifting their weight
from water
and before that a forest
with strange forms of animal
shades of wing
skins I’d never seen
I’ve come looking for proof
of what I cannot touch your body
for instance
I felt it next to me
last night in that strange bed rolled
onto your shoulder
wishful
and necessary thinking
But the rainforest I tread this morning
is thick with silence—
sunlight muted by spruce
Evidence found thus far:
stained glass of gossamer
sans spider
hovel of a rubber boa but not the slash
of its sentence
At last
after the slick boards of a bridge
I stand on the wingtip
of the map scanning the bright
horizon
Spouts rise like smoke