TEACHER
I know I’ve made a christ of you
the way I gather up the crumbs
beneath your table, the way I bathe
your feet with my hair.
But this blind worship
won’t do, and I must take and eat
new prayer. Teacher! It was not given me
to sit at your right hand or your left.
Thought you saw me under the fig tree,
but it was just a trick of the light
cleft between branches.
The Oath
The little hand he holds
Is all they could find to give him:
Wrapped in blue plastic,
A hand once brown, now bloodied and black,
The hand of one too young for school,
The hand of his daughter,
Riven in the charred rubble
That had been her room,
The hand he held so often
To guide the child in safety
Through Gaza’s streets in blistering heat
For the cooling waters of the Med,
A hand he cannot hold much longer,
Nor can he stay with his wife and weep.
His oath won’t release him
To surrender to his grief.
He must return to his hospital.
He must attend to children who live,
No matter where the next bomb falls,
No matter if it falls on him.
Feature Image: Victim of Israeli airstrike in Jabalia (wikicommons)
Old Road Sign
The sere severed plywood sign painted a modest white
was nailed once to spindly posts among the water oaks.
Now by accident it dangles, peeling and warped.
Underbrush too dense perhaps to let the fool board fall.
The paint is blanched so that it fairly imitates the mists
oft seen in bayous chockablock with oaks and black gums
and strands of gray-green moss on cypress limbs,
but five large letters—grim reminders of ill will—
still glare as bright as the morning when the prophet shoved
cheap pine posts down in the weedy grass and muck.
Broad feverish strokes in a harsh shade of red,
they’re there for homeless ducks and long-haul truckers—grunts,
dogsbodies, quacks—to read and contemplate…REPEN.
While stenciled on the far edge of the broken sign,
the faded letters barely legible…JESU.
Image: Daniele Idini
Whom You’re Never Told
She pleads with her mantras for years—endless
In a hill so tranquil, where she is—she always is
There she dwells untold, whom you never know—whom you’re never told
Bearing the name; Ujung Geni.
The Javanese herbalist who cheats
Time and death.
She broods in her thoughts no other than
To live, to live, to live, and to live
To live nowhere other than in her hill so tranquil
She lives more than the trees and times bore, more than love;
Ujung Geni, alone with her thoughts,
In her hill so tranquil.
Three musky cumin family of parsley, a branch of senthe,
Roasted parkia seed, petals of wijaya kusuma, buds of clove,
A finger long aromatic ginger and turmeric,
Altingia excelsa just a bark, dripped with essence
Of fermented cassava. Mesoyi, slice a little.
ethereal oil—Cinnamomum sintoc blume.
Powder them all,
Bathe with them,
Breathing their fumes
In a hill so tranquil, where she is—where she always is
Longer with spells written, mantras spoken, jamu can fulfill.
With the earth buttering all spices, bearing her will,
To live forever more with jamu no pottery can infill.
For ages long she lives indeed till death favors
her no more.
She knows to live but not to live for.
In a hill so tranquil, even the hill dismal, where she lives
She belongs but what is it for? These scars in eternal bearers
All tiresome mantras in gazillion styles and songs.
She begs to live no more.
The First of February
Well, here’s a pile of puke on a bank of snow,
Yoga-pants-purple, budget-cocktail-blue,
Lava lurid as a toy volcano,
Day-glo confetti frozen stiff as glue.
The fire hydrant’s calked in hardened gum.
A Phillies Blunt’s in a bottle of Pepsi
Inside a purple Shark Week Slurpee,
And it looks like someone pissed all over them.
A ghost-ship umbrella is partway jammed
In the snow heap’s side; its tattered black sail
Of nylon flutters; a stroller is crammed
Into a dumpster nearby. I’m stuck, a snail
Inside a crusted, slowly draining tank.
The chill in me is deeper than I’d like,
My pockets packed with lint, the blue snowbank,
Spiked with pink spokes of a Barbie bike.
Lingerie spills from a cast-off backpack.
The neon tubes are dismal, dark at dawn:
DRAFT BEER now drab, the BAR sign simply black,
Latimer Deli’s knife-steel grate still down.
The stained-glass windows of McGlinchey’s Bar
Are dead. The only thing that holds a light
That’s real is melting snow, the run of bright
Rills altering to echoes in the sewer.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
Hats On for the Happy
We couldn’t go in person
since the car had grown moss inside.
So we sat on Zoom in Birmingham,
between a Dublin screen
and one in the south of Chicago.
We were silent, serious. Our separated frames fused
to witness the in-person
rejection of otherlessness. Two Canadians
entered the gallery, laughing under starry pointed hats.
Were they suggesting
we far-flung wedding guests, fixed
to the wall, watching and waiting, might have a party
of our own? Dublin man
fetched himself a sunhat. He handled
his brim a lot. I left the screen and found my bonnet –
orange felt, with a yellow
flower, in a cupboard I never use.
The Canadians waved me back to my chair.
The Chicago Mississippi-
Bankside lady pierced the screen
with solemnity – who would not be solemn
at the imminence of such
vows – then disappeared behind
clouds of simulated background. She came back
Queened, in a boat of black
hat, that was tulled and beaded
and pinned tight to her slowly unsombreing stare.
Our four tiny head-high squares
of life sparkled over the grey room. We
made champagne-rich speeches about commitment
to wear and be worn by, to cover
and to be covered by. My partner was bare-
headed. He never wears a hat, only a sun visor
that shades his sight
when the heat-sapped tryst of eye
and sky is painful. The bride folded her veil back
into a hood. The groom
meditated on her draped hair
and then on her naked face. Say it, whispered each
brimmed and muted heart.
Feature Image: Daniele Idini
Calling All Angels
Leaves fall like secret prayers—
calling all angels
September’s having her best
orgasm in a century. Everything lingers
in climax, the character of the light, earthy
fragrances, a whole heaving calendar week
with an arched spine.
Here’s how I know the world
is ill and absurd: a dead fawn stares up
from the roadside, spots unsullied, perfect
and gone. Most days I choose to forget, but
entire families explode in Palestine. Cascades
of leaves now. Calling all angels yes god yes
Holy Hay
I didn’t have a chance to show you
the sainfoin I sowed back in May,
remembering our holiday in Spain
where we kept seeing it in bloom
by the road and on waste ground, covering
whole hillsides, great cerise stains
of what we later learned was Holy Hay.
Back here I bought some and spread it, watching
as seedlings appeared, unfurled nodding leaflets
in the rough and roguing wind and rain.
Maybe it was the wet, or the rabbits;
whatever, just one made it through to flower,
when each closed and softly bristled brush became
a clump of rosy Jagger lips. Yet I remember
wrongly: it wasn’t Spain, it was Sicily,
and maybe what we saw was Sulla,
Italian sainfoin, a deeper red colour,
but its name would never stick with me;
not like Holy Hay, coumarin still drifting
from an early mowing, with vetch and clovers,
sweet vernal grass, sown by an unseen other
who disappeared with the passing spring.
That’s why I tried it in our garden,
feeling it somehow sacred, so it might recover
the past; seeing it there you would laugh and
I would find in that perennial trait
passed down from your dear, faithful father
a way back to those fertile fields of grace.
Feature Image: Flowers of Hedysarum coronarium at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE
with the divine. The plumbline is vertical
as the resulting verse, so that neither agony
nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise,
sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps
these are the only prophets left to us, still able
to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s
needle-eye, a tremendous feat because her heavy lid
cannot stay open, closes now even on a clear day.
I imagine a bird and the bird is language, the bird
encircles the head of the most high and does not
flinch or burn, does not hide itself in a cleft of rock
that the holy might pass by. It cannot land. The point
is that the bird approaches—the point is flight. We need
only send our winged words through the needle’s eye,
the poets tell me, as though it’s easy, as though handfuls
of heaven are there for anyone to pattern, Dante or
the old woman at the end of the street who drives out
alone to check her spring calves. And yet to see her
returning at dusk, you’d swear she has covenantal
rainbows on her face, in her white hair.
Image: Daniele Idini
THE LONGEST DAY OF THE YEAR
Lucky gull chicks on a city roof
take food from their parents and snuggle for warmth;
for them, life has begun as well as it could.
The flightless chick who fell from its nest above
and is abandoned by its parents
on a hostile gull family’s roof
is shut in a large, bright, open room
and soon learns that fear is a nail
that fixes the whole being to a hard board.
The lost chick can hear its family above
and calls to them, looking up to a place
it cannot reach and from which no helps comes;
flight is weeks away. The enemy adults attack
and the refugee huddles in a corner
watching the privileged chicks eat well,
all because the spots on its head
are not in the correct pattern.
Sometimes it cannot resist any longer
and rushes forward to try and share the food,
but is driven back by sharp, flashing beaks.
The fallen one must somehow hang on,
surviving on forgotten scraps
until its feathers are ready
and a new phase of life begins.
The prisoner walks around and around,
the will to live fighting the hunger,
but it cannot escape for now, no matter what.
Living in terror in this rooftop hell,
every day is the longest day of the year.
Feature Image: Magda Ehlers