BOOK OF SAND: volume 2
"What star falls unseen?"
i
dreaming
of the place we love best, the sea and sand, holding the woman we love best in our temperamental and rusted hearts, thinking of the men we respected dearest, the cotton cupped in the leather-brown palms of the field stems that grew along Rte. 1, the barbers that smelled of moth balls and hopes, and the snipping of their shears as we moved thoughting of the ideas we cherish most,
tiger turning into butter around the palm tree and palmetto.
Dreams in our head, love in our hearts and drink in our hand
The cotton fields plowed between tar and stone and rock and grandfather’s amber stories
the road of cane and cotton to carry you fore, ever.
the sun, the moon, and truth,
the work is to discover what all your heart is given itself to:
mirror or wreckage?
You move through the bends towards her and surrender what you know will be lost.
ii
Beneath the bamboo leaf shells and lays a better self, untied,
soft, nutrient and needed, the taste of the Sun buttering rice along the hills:
remember what the dream world tastes of, what the old woman with the amber skin and emerald eyes said, while shooting arrows toward the mountain boars:
salt, sweat and the hair pulled from trees, the cadavers of ghosts.
the pieces of the heart broken, puzzle pieces of damp bread, spread and drifting
toward the shores of other islands and other men:
the face of a woman exhausted by the expansion
oh her wobbly heart, fierce and swinging in front of gods
once.
You were there, a warrior then you grew into a protector and finally a mortician.
Grief never ends like the railroad across the horizon and hills
And the shift of light and turnbuckle turns grief into length,
the reminder of your love that dripped down the walls of our home like moss and humid stain, the reminder that as you bid me in the morning, your tongue wagging poetry and taste,
your dad was still whispering and talking to you from over the island’s divide.
iii
Through the field burned like hay set alight by a bitter god I walked alone
Following the recent-dead stallion that once bulled the battery of guns through the mud
As the boys fell like ripened pears from the tree in the distance
And there we were, reflection, Narcissus’ mirror and all
Our limbs, our tongues, our hearts pulled through the dead and the mud
And we awoke to understand that we had lost all
And once were child afield and galloping toward that tree, gone
As a child I chased trapped light, curled up under rocks and gem
Trees darkened by time into ash and tinder
As a way of feeling my way into the world: bog, minnow, tadpole, gold teeth at the bottom of the pond and I believed.
Now, old and wearied by her burial, up the hill so that she could look over,
Not from above us, but from beneath the sky that raised by the sea toward a higher elevation.
As a child, I raised knobby-kneed and buckling, leaping toward all that lay ahead
And now:
The trees flower stone
The land fecund with bones of opossum and beetle
And I wing toward the light, dragonfly
My heart left behind were she lay, like a cicada’s shell clawing into the side of her tree
Mark that.
iv
There goes the sky, a leviathan inked along the lids of clouds by a red pencil
Made up for the awaiting night, god’s tempest, the ghosts’ play yard and I listened
Quick by Quick, over barrel-latch and skinny hope:
But instead,
He counts the sky as one does their socks and garments after laundry,
Expecting, assured, that one will be lost, impossibly free
And then came in a moment in the late afternoon lanterned light, grace.
A stone marker by a single sapling as the child kicks up dirt and dandelion
And toes circles in the grass like vowels and cowlicked curls
And the father walks toward the swing son, as his heart slips away, and then
In his eyes collapses backward, the size and scale of a tossed-away bottle of whisky and
he knew right there and then:
We cannot hold those gossamer moments we love, be it the gallop around a tree
Or the prance over the hill in the distance of the child, lover or day’s end.
Close your eyes and begin the walk toward sight
Leaving as the sound of the child’s laughter taught and formed and uplifting,
This dreamed-up parachute or May Day pole ribbon.
And the father, stretches upon the pyre of the summer class, and
He cannot, not ever, protect this green heart, this green patch of softness,
Nor his son’s green smile as it billows toward fear will eventually face him.
And that has made all the difference, between
Them.
And not all may be lost, even if eventually all is lost-
set that at your feet and whisper it along the lines of your life:
a ghost singing in the depth of the back of your throat.
