Other Such Matters

A Shabbos nap, I think
and close my eyes
and try to sleep
and see
what i saw
and open my eyes
and blink
and close them again
and see again
and think,
I should read,
Beginnings,
I think,
and open my eyes
and get up
and get the book
and open to a page,
any page, in this book of firsts,
and this is the page:
“The First Dream”
and it is not Yosef,
sold from home,
by the dream-ascended throne
and it is not Yaakov,
fleeing home,
asleep on the stone,
and it is not one of our mothers,
it is not one of our fathers,
it is not the dream even of our God,
it is that of a foreign king,
Avimelech,
who is not our father,
who is not our king,
who has been offered our mother,
Sarah,
by our father,
Avraham,
who is scared,
who doubts the mystery, maybe,
who deceives,
and Avimelech dreams
and God threatens his life,
for taking the taken,
but the king objects,
and claims righteousness,
Avraham offered his sister,
not his wife,
the king says,
Sarah claimed him a brother,
not her life,
the king says,
and God relents,
and Avimelech does not take her,
he returns her,
and he lives,
thought, speech, action,
and the procession begins again,
and I close the book,
and I think of the orbit
of Sarah and Avraham,
and where it brought them,
and where it would bring them,
and I think of our orbit,
of where it has brought us,
and what it has brought us,
of where it will bring us,
and what it will bring us,
of us,
and us:
Around and around,
together,
we spin,
sovev,
we spin,
and together
we will dream again.

Yes is the answer to all
your questions, even when
it is not it is still yes.

A frozen sea. A peeling
palm. An instance of mischief.
A gifted fog.

Yes to all these and yes
to all those, yes to all
guesses and yes to all nos.

Forget, forget, forget you
grow, forget you sit,
forget you know. For
getting lost begets
a thunderous glow.

Only now you sleep?
When the king is in the field,
when the field is the street,
when the street is in your window
and the panes take all the heat,
only now you sleep?

Are your dreams diamonds,
and your hands in them big
and pulsating and clean?
Are your thoughts a ship
in a bottle? Are they not?

Pinkies crush diamonds in dreams,
and ships in bottles are models
of ships in a seam. The sea
is clear because the sea is not real.

Wake up! Wake up!
You are asleep in the street,
and the cultures are swarming,
and it is you they will eat.

Wake up! Wake up!
You are asleep in the street,
and the vultures are learning
and it is the air that they seek,
while you, you are asleep in the heat.

The street is unwinding into a small
tornado in every open doorway.
The walls are falling cause the concrete
is laughing. The earth is swallowing,
the earth is drinking. The core
is churning and its heat is its dreaming.

Wake up! Wake up!
You are alight from the deep,
you are infinite, you are pure—
Open your eyes and so be.
Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!
Wake up! You are a saint.

Did you forget?

Wake up, you are a whole.
Wake up and remember
that sleep is surrender,
memory is not everything,
because memory is not yet.

The king is in the field,
the field is in the street,
the king may say he is leaving,
but he has not yet.

Searching for the wrong-eyed Moses
north of Jacksonville in the fog at night,
the road split ends and I am lost again.

West is the myth of newness, a view.
East is the horizon, which is the future
that does not ask, “Now, dear, where to?”

At this point, I turn around to go home
because at this point I always turn around
to go home. I know my way. The fog clears.

The cherries taste like cherries, the carpet
ends where the tile begins. I know this song—
cherries like cherries. I go out to search again.

Standing in the corner of my left eye I see him,
but I am reaching for the highway, speeding
to pass a lifted truck. A smudge. I cannot stop.

Searching. Night. The fog. The fork. Sighing.
Buried in blur. Forgetting. Lines like lines.
Day. The sun. The straight road just glows.

The second time I saw him, he asked me
for 10 dollars. How could I know Moses
was broke? I kept on. Six months had passed,

I had forgotten. For five months, I heard,
he searched for me, one good eye peering left
then right, the other endless, trained forward.

He walked straight on into the fog, forgot
the sun, forgot the birds, the morning, the bad eye
and the fog. He stopped looking just as I stopped.

And that would have been that, had the road
not again called, had the bird not again seen,
the morning not again sung, had that been that.

But that not being that, eye and road and search
being one mirror in front of another, I caught
the blur finally and held it till it asked me a question.

“Why do you hold me?” it asked. “Why can’t
you be held?” I answered. “Exactly,” I heard,
followed first by laughter and then nothing.

So hands empty, eyes steady, year motionless, I
stand at a fork in full light. The fog may return or
home call or cherries be cherries. Still. I will go.

Start from the bottom,
from the rusty depths of a broken sea:

blonde, red and brown, woven
and waving in the slow gnaw of a chin.

At the salty skin two lips begin —
impossibly aligned, asymmetrical, adrift,

a boat cracked down the middle,
spider-web fractured — sinking.

A single surviving freckle wades on the pale
surface, the driftwood of a cheek bone.

From the dry sky a bulging bulb falls
and rises and falls — a buoy that blinks

light of rippling blue and gold, open
and close, open and close, below

umbrella eyebrows. And look, there,
a dot in the distance, red with hope.

In each pocket, I hold a world:
The world of me. The world of the other.
The world healed of me. The world of we.
I have many pockets and many worlds.
I fill each world with reminders
of its worldness: dirt, water, silence, skin.
I fill each reminder with words
filled by wind. I go about my day.
I create. I listen. I whistle. I smile.
Worlds spin around in my pockets.
I go for a walk to a lake and throw
one world in. I walk home. I eat. I sleep.
In the morning, the streets are quiet.
I put my pants on, the worlds begin.
I sit and wonder whose pocket I’m in.

Campus, Saturday.
No note, no owner, just fate.
A Modelo case.

Published 8 Feb 2010 at Beer Haiku Daily

I.

Three women stood on a bridge hundreds of feet above an ancient river. One woman had no arms, no legs and no memory, so the fact that she was on a bridge which was hundreds of feet in the air and strung between two sheer cliffs, she attributed to God. The second woman had eyes that had been sealed shut when she was much younger, so the cold wind against her face, the unending prickliness of the rope between her clenched fists, the rush of the distant water and the pendulum swinging barely beneath her feet, these she called God. The third woman was born on the bridge. Her mother had moved on to the other side of the canyon years earlier. She had promised to write, but, even if she had, it is unlikely anyone from the post office could or would have gone the miles necessary to make it to the bridge. This woman was not bitter about the lack of letters. In fact, she had long since forgotten about letters or mothers or bridges or that thing called the self or time. She was a cloud and her eyes and her ears stared down and down and down like lightning onto the gray strip of all existence below her.

II.

One day, while the first woman and the second woman lay side by side in the sun like train tracks across the planks of the bridge, the first woman fell asleep and dreamed of the bridge. In the dream, it was filled with people filing back and forth, from either side of the canyon to either other side. She dreamt she was in one these lines. She dreamt she had legs to walk on and wait with when the line paused, as it occasionally would and presently was. She dreamt she had arms to grip and steady and found herself. In front of her in the line was an old bent man with an old bent cane. He smiled a lot, she dreamt, but didn’t say much. Standing behind the woman was Lucille Ball, and to her side, walking the other way, was the whole Simpsons family. Homer, it seemed, had lost wait. Or, had it drawn out of him. Santa’s Little Helper and all the Snowballs were following not far behind. There was a sort of brightness at the end of the bridge. Once, when she turned her head back to talk to Lucille, she noticed there was the same brightness at the other end of the bridge. She dreamt the line to move again. She passed others: Aretha Franklin, her grandmother, Foxy Cleopatra, Ancient Cleopatra, Ghandi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, her mailman, her mailman’s life partner, Crosby, Stills, Nash, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and a bearded dwarf or two. Eventually, as she approached the edge of the bridge, the faces in front behind beside and below her began to fade. Then there was light and birds chirping and the woman awoke beside a river. It was morning. She blinked and looked around, remembered laying down among the rocks to drown her ears in the bursting of the shore. She stood, opened her eyes wide, thought of how dark and dreamless sleep has seemed. She let the heaviness of it drip out of her for a second and then started her day.

III.

The woman with sealed eyes wrapped herself in air and light. She made herself a stranger to darkness. When she gripped the taut rope, when she leaned against it and walked across it, she aimed to steady her heart from its fluttering awe. She scaled the length of the bridge dozens of times in a day. She learned which planks wiggled, which wobbled, which slipped and which dipped. She fixed the splintered and painted the plain. When the old approached, she took them, and in her arms, carried them across. When the children came, she grabbed their hands and they skipped that length of sky in song. Sometimes, she would just lay all day in the sun and let her thoughts fall from her head. She liked losing them and knew more would come. She got into the habit of laying and not thinking like this. She liked that the bridge’s boards were so hard and unyielding. She would place her hands by her sides and try to make herself as rigid as the bridge, a hardness above to parallel a hardness below. And the thoughts dripped and dripped. The crippled and the kids kept coming. She tried to help and heal them as she had done before, but more and more her mind looked to the time when she could resume the position, be flat and empty. The habit made her heavy. She didn’t feel heavy, but her closed eyes said otherwise. She would lay and sink and lay and sink but all the while feel the sun getting hotter and the breeze getting harder and imagine being lifted higher and higher into the air. The less thoughts she had, the higher she felt herself flying. Then one day, there was only the bridge and a slight, five-foot-long bump in the boards. Some say she was that bump. The sun and the wind, I think, would agree.

IV.

And I don’t have to tell you what happened with the last woman. It was always between the fact of her eyes and the pounding waves of sky. She would leave the bridge and find her way to the river, or she would become a tree and dig her self down deeper. She either existed or she didn’t.