HOUSE OF RIVERS, HOUSE OF CLAY

 

HOUSE OF RIVERS

You come home to your first home,

green and reedy, furnished with redwing blackbirds.

 

A house you share with the Great Blue Heron,

stick nest hidden deep in the canopy.

 

House of deep morning where two rivers slip

through your fingers

flooding empty rooms with loss.

 

Home at last unsettled one, to make peace with all that formed you—

A dappled childhood, shadow and light that gave you quiet eyes.

 

Here you rest in the mind’s half-closed eye

flat as a reed on the outbound tide,

 

a body dissolved in rapt attention watching

fiddler crabs scavenge the mudflats

 

until the powdery light of dusk

settles in the cattails and a light

 

in the kitchen window calls

the children home.

 

 

ROLLING STONE

 

I stole this stone from a Tennessee river, took it straight from its stony bed.

Right away I liked its milky opacity, cool as a cave in my open hand.

 

I could say I chose this stone because all my dreams trace this river

past towering banks of rhododendron to a sinkhole hidden

 

by massive shoulders of Precambrian stone where the river plunges

deep into time. But the stone chose me.

 

Right away it liked my empty pockets, my stumbling feet

and my hands, lost and searching at the ends of my arms.

 

Now the stone sits on a white ledge in a white room and remembers

the benediction of water: the way afternoon light adagios

 

through a grove of cathedral ferns. The way a father walks a child

out of the forest into the world and she learns she is safe enough

 

where snow swirls in high silence on the Great Divide

and ancient stars burn into time.

 

HOUSE OF FIRE

 

I lived in a house of fire, drawn

to its white-hot heart, flaming tongues raging.

 

Fiery sofas. Fiery beds. Plates, cups,

shoes, books hurled, burning.

 

I lingered in that house of flame, dazzled by heat

bending light into shimmer, loving the stunt

 

of narrow escape, the searing illusion

of searing truth, everything, perhaps at stake.

 

Too long, too long in the hot house

until at last it taught me this:

 

Out of great pain, out of great love, the heart breaks

open—fearless, spilling light.

 

I WAS 16

 

I remember, Mother, how you looked in your clean white strait jacket:

a 90-pound finch, wings pinned

useless at your sides.

 

            House of rivers, house of reeds, summer mornings voiced by redwings.

 

 

How we hid the scissors, hid the knives, lied

under doctor’s orders to fool your fiery mind.

 

            House of suffocating heat. House of sorrowful tides.

 

The sunny day they came for you, a trance of alibis,

capture construed as rescue—your or ours?

 

            Great Blue Heron stock still in the water, yes

 

to save you we betrayed you.

 

Eyes of the hunter, hunter eyes trained on murky depths; life beneath the surface furtive, miraculous

 

how we survived, like sticks hurled the way you taught us into the flood-gorged stream, sinking under the stone bridge, popping up on the other side.

 

Glimmer world of ebb and flow;

 

your face as they forced you into the ambulance alone,

 

things no more, no less than they are:

the terror in your eyes.

 

How we hid behind dark trees watching. Our own blank fear. And a long year in a beige house beside a tidal inlet, no outlet for our pain,

 

            the mystery of other creatures breathing, feeding,

singing.

 

SUNRISE

 

Called to the window by petals

leaping, morning breeze. No words

 

soft enough to say

how this delicate infusion

 

(a teaspoon of violet dissolved

in an empty sky)

 

alters the intake of breath.

 

I bow my head

and look into my heart:

 

open door

patch of sky

and the wind blows through.

 

HOUSE OF CLAY

 

As for me, I will choose this mud-walled home, speckled

with stubble of stick and straw, daubed with pine pitch.

 

House of humble clay, this planet Earth, formed by fire, cured

by the heat of a star, chiseled by rivers, by rivers of air,

 

six million years of human hunger, love

and war. House of forest, prairie, canyon, sky.

 

Of tawny savannahs roamed by the last wild herds,

zebra surging over Serengeti Plains.

 

House of terraced field, coral reef, desert sand, raging river

and dry well. Of polar waters’ waning ice, granite peaks

 

ringed by indefinite clouds. O house of sweet wet clay,

riddled with fine roots, malleable in human hands.

 

Our small shared house of flowering earth

 For six—no, seven billion mouths. Our one clay cup.

 

BED OF ROSES

6:00 AM

 

We sleep on cotton roses deftly woven. Not a single thorn.

Summer air sluices through window screens.

 

7:00 AM

 

The borders of tranquility are breached.

News of the world batters the front door.

 

Sunday paper. Silent catharsis. Over coffee

we initial copies of an old confession.

 

News as chorus. As hymnal. As siren.

Is the world more hurt or have I grown old?

 

8:00 AM

 

You sink back to sleep. I pull on shorts,

head for the garden, bathe both arms

 

in waves of aromatic mint, pull

long cool strands of grass, one at a time.

 

A fool’s errand. A willing fool greedy for life.

Bees in the roses. Grackle in midair.

 

HIGH ON RAIN

High on rain

I sit transfixed;

the afternoon slips inside the eye

of the sparrow who flits

from nest to roof

to nest again,

his shrill cry a mantra,

a green wall drawn around us

walling out nothing at all.

Afternoon after rain,

wind chimes a temple bell stuck

on one low-throated note. Spent

blossoms fringe the ends

of green apples,

not one bigger than an English pea.

This late May nursery of egg and seed

and song thinly veiled by a screen

of fine-toothed leaves—99,099 faces of god—

and all this time abhinivesa,

fear of the hawk,

fear of death, sweetens

every indrawn breath.

 

ONOMATOPOEIA

The word is like a drug.

Sit here beside me

with your coffee and your long list

of things to do

while I whisper

 

drowsy

 

drowsy

 

drowsy.

 

Look. Your stupid list

is a paper boat

 

adrift

 

in a hot black sea.

 

Kiss me.

 

HOUSE OF AIR

 

 

YES I DO

Actually, the piano plays the man, pulls notes

from his vinyl fingers, plucks chords

 

from his supple spine and the brass—oh, saxophone alone

tells our troubles so sweet, we just learn to love them

 

as we love life, this comical tune spun from dust

kicked up by kids in a sandbox circled by mothers

 

whose arms are green willows and brave-shouldered fathers

whose hearts are shields emblazoned with tears—this

 

is the music that lives us, sometimes a radio caught

between stations, fritzing unnoticed in unheated rooms,

 

sometimes a ballad poured on the wounds

of the stone-faced man in the airport bar,

 

sometimes a slow rhythmic insistence

like a thrummed bass joined by a red piano

 

wringing the brilliance out of the spaces

between the notes and before you know it

 

there’s a trumpet spinning truth out of each

exhalation and you catch yourself

 

just for an instant falling awake

as the music holds you in its bony arms

 

and opens your eyes with the blade

of your heart.

 

EQUIPOISE: SATURDAY AT THE GARDENS

I take my seat beside a fountain—

white beads pepper black water.

 

Twelve stacked Buddhas loom

above the shallow pool

 

impossible tower balanced

between heaven and earth

 

a band of Buddhas caught in the act

of equipoise, tribute to the power

 

of human attention, the warm joke of gravity

stashed in flowing bronze sleeves.

 

I open an empty book, place it on a concrete wall,

I am here to receive the morning.

 

Muddled clouds hide a flat white sun; small birds

slash mild air into random diagonals.

 

At my feet, the sky

given back by water:

 

thin skin of vapor

pierced by wind.

 

GRAFFITI SCRAWLED ON DEEP SPACE

We were here.

We passed through, life

 

coming at us, a torrent of molecules

and moments.

 

We were brilliant, savage, easily bored.

We were like a dog

 

with his head out the window of the car

at 50 miles an hour,

 

ears pinned back,

cheeks whuffling

 

as we gulped the summer wind, feeding

on pure sensation.

 

We chased our share of rabbits, danced

our little dreams, disappeared.

 

In our wake,

a nursery of stars