....From The Tree Of..................Pain Around Us
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_______________________________________________________ The Piercing It is not to be borne, the sight of a child in khaki green, eyes screaming through the screen how scared she is, reaching across thousands of miles of air space to a mother's murdered heart. How can the world spin in such agony, except it be greased with pain and pain, it's propulsion. Webshot Click. Look. Click, look, one face was saved; I saved it, that's how it felt- a lovely laughing Iraqi female, twelve, thirteen at most hand over mouth, jet eyes lit up with life. Her skin au lait pushed into tightening pleats of in-skin-happy at the corners, her face the kind you want to beam out into space and say hey, look: here's one of us, a female, best of speciies. Please don't hurt us. Come in peace. She is what we produce here on this blue spun tilt-a-whirl, a young one. Just a girl- I dream I've made her laugh. She lifts her white, white teeth into the sun- and if you get this, if you come to kill, come quick: we need a common cause, an Us Against Them. Come green with huge obsidian eyes, invading from the beaches, climbing out of saucers, we need a more apparent Them than this one , please come quick. Nothing To Patch I had a dog once. Used to be a neighbor's dog who was tormented something awful: ear cut clear away, tail dipped in gasoline, set on fire. It damn near broke my heart. I ran and gathered him up. Hugged him to me. Brought him home and sewed the ear. Applied the ointments, bathed and brushed and loved him fiercely. I'd walk, he'd run beside me till one day, the neighbor whistled and that fool mutt went wagging home, blistered tail and all. And never looked back. Not once. I swore off dogs. And looking beyond the fence. Shape In The Distance Coming toward me all my life was a man made out of words. I saw light between the vowels and nouns, and knew he was just words clustered, looking like a man but I read his every move, and he was real. Began to feel the words matter. As I did, an arm, a leg, a face formed, blood pumped through when they finally betrayed, I said: "You are just glued words, afterall." They fell to a heap and sadder than I'd ever sweep, swept them away. The Long Crucifixion Churches are for those who cannot know that prayer stoops every day. This back bowed barks a name the burning hand of God taps and where He taps the weals appear, roses grow, shred the flesh -thorn antiphons of love that sing hurt stagger back blackness falls the third time. There is no Simon left to heft what's kept behind: this cross we carry not one path to Golgotha but all our lives. after dust is settling can't you hear the lullaby of quiet dead things being pulverized in any life there are a thousand magic moments living breaths of what is precious going slowly there's been too much spilled and split and split again to make much sense of it like a division problem how much pain goes out of one thing into another till the answer's finally zero carry the memory it's prime ...indivisible ...except .......by itself .............or .............one Nowhere After the swirling, choppy anger, after the clash of temperament like knives and forks crashed to the floor from a kitchen drawer that would have been better left closed, after names and accusations -the frustration of only keyboard pound when you wished for flesh- and after curses, swapping sides to trade for something fresh to ride and wave to the crowd, (you were away so long) after all of that ...............disturbance come now, white- the whitewhite screen of gone and the eerie silence of the no word nothing nowhere knife and wounds that do not bleed on a vacuum page there is no rage. There's only knowing. The Death Of Belief The child woke. The day was bright and there beside her on the pillow, slumped a bear: some polyester, wool, shoe button eyes. There were many such teddy bears in the world and this one wasn't special. Never breathed, not really. Was in fact the very same bear held by numberless little girls who all believed its magic voice spoke just to them. She knew it was a lie. There'd been no voice at all, just longing in herself. Just as, on Easter morning when the stone appeared to roll, it was a trick of light, and and no one rose; only a dead man lay in a dark part of the cave where everyone stored the things they loved and he lay still. Belief is longing, nothing more and bears shall picnic where they please, and sing in angel voices for a time, just a time- but not forever. The girl got up, walked into the world and never looked back. Promise Forsythia gasped its last. No more yellow stars crowd green leafed bush. It's green leafed bush again; dowdy. Golden gone. Early April, it transformed to child in Easter dress, unabashed by beauty, proud as a rooster crowing spring. Now it's quiet. Rooted as a plug at the base of porch, not recollecting how its little torches shouted out a permanence it had no right to crow, so recently released of snow, forgetting how it goes from freeze to bloom to silence in its hunter green, haunted by remembered yellow; it had a look of promise believed before the sieve that holds us cupped, sucked every last gold dazzle through. I thought of you and how you'd never betray the ones you love. Ghosts Years hence, when if by chance someone should read you, ask me if I knew the man, I'd have to say no, I did not. There was a man I knew chose to reconstitute for a time; took an altered view, hard to remember him now. No pictures of him exist. Could not be photographed any more than ghosts or thought; you'd have to crack my skull, pry both halves open, poke around inside to find the one I knew. I think I grew him in the grooves of my own brain. I recall a sense and smell of rain, hard rain, and lightning sometimes; he was a kind of weather, whether he blew through or held as a front- his color always changing like a traffic light. There were many men in that one: I knew none. On To Page 11 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
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