What is the body but a bolt of slow lightning
falling through clouds of lonesome meat?
The bones and meat are not the body's self
they cloak its brightness in this world of mirrors
When the silvered film flakes away and you look through,
use both eyes and don't forget to breathe
Would you then see my death falling through you
like moonlight through pine needles, like angels through fog?
A child's voice in a midnight room, singing songs
of terror and loss, singing songs to the stony dark
Opening at dawn the kitchen door, you startle
the last of night and hear it giving way to the sun
Next poem in the Contraries loop
My boy's body stands in a field of wheat,
green sprouts on black soil in every direction.
Always childhood's shadow falls across adult moments,
edges of bruise-dark clouds lit with gold longing.
Eased from its socket, my wisdom tooth . . .
an eye opens beneath my tongue, viewing dull roots.
My boy's body rises from the flooded field;
years later the same drops dry on my cheeks.
My boy's body glistens in the gym class shower,
its few pubic strands coiling in shame.
It will all vanish when the neural nets fail,
the world slipping away neuron by neuron.
Mother, you swung the switch hard.
The backs of my legs stung for hours.
Grapes ripen among leaves
that shade a sparrow's nest.
"Go and get a switch from the yard":
forty-five years later, I've forgotten why.
Under the oak table, I cower,
three years old, terrified of lightning.
Mother, you swung the switch hard.
My heart was clotted with welts for years.
Between green leaves, a blue sky without clouds;
I sit wedged in a high fork, watching.
My mother's womb turned to dust;
topsoil blown into drifts across the road.
Water hauled from a distant well to fill the cistern;
a rabbit drowned during our sleep.
Scars in my right ear, traces of old pain;
marble smooth as glass, before the name is cut.
"Enough dirt in your ears to grow potatoes,"
my mother's voice echoing off the barn's red face.
Garden rows made straight with white string,
lettuce seed strewn in the narrow trench.
A child rides in a cloud of dust
the length of a dusty country road.
In his eye the face of Christ revolves—
tilted panes of tinted glass,
a stick of wood under the carpenter's saw,
a swollen seed buried in dark dirt:
the April sun holds steady til dusk;
the child's face closes like a wing.
Who can imagine the other world,
the world that lives in this world's shadow?
Within the dust cloud, a running horse
sweats beneath the child's knees.
Within the horse, its heart refracts
a network of hot rivered blood.
Within the blood falling through the horse,
a subtle light flares and fades and flares again.
Next poem in the Otherness loop
my ribs Your ladder, oh divine One
the soles of Your feet lighter than starshine
hillside dolmens—the narrow door of flesh
gives issue to myriad leaves, sprites, blossoms
emptiness fills the center, surrounds the edge
between, run crumbling veins of baroque desire
no letters exist that can spell Your name
no mouth that can shape the sounds to name You
phosphor flickers, the transient essence of image
walking through the spine's center, taste only delight
over the first ocean a languid voice coils
winding and unwinding the secret engines of the world
those whose bare feet leave pierced prints—they have Your face
those who weep in the polluted night—they have Your voice
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