Transformation and Transition


“Reversing a death is not the same as restoring a life.”—Sunita Puri


Watch his heart untie, an old pair of shoes     shoulders slopped black & blue 

laces and lungs let lose and words go in tangles fraying from all he knew 

through the eyelets his truth unstitched      Sine qua non, blue the hue where language

unscrewed the familiar familial thoughts now long along his jawline, remember 

when they unbuckled the door and now vacationing birds come      wings and omens, unglued  

still she longs the forlorn days the bodies sway careening and upended in a lake canoe

find him, the dampened hallways find him, the noosed backstays of this backstage 

unhung city, tobacco and vegan coupling    and the city hearts white flailed bespoken news 

remember the simple geometry of living and paperback, carboard on the curb underneath

entirety came, arms wide    and the sun, unglued


late in Spring in a drive-by rain, falling you go small as pebbles car off the road 

the view from a roof top    her thumb nail blue, falls away newly used 

shorn eyebrows in the morning light tongue patterns      ink up the patter and promises scatter

food steps of the elderly syllables, tea-stained, innervated in raincoat’s calculus 

of a wobbly night and falling flight between the silence and the noise, the crowd

the sweet bite of dendrite of licorice laced between fingers folded into a poem

at day, stanzas walk in the rain as the river turned up its heels     the glamour of the ceiling

in May when we forgot our hearts language didn’t unlock old

doors not the key, the prance, not the soft-syllable of romance    only you


if upon then a night late in Spring scribbled up by rain falling between tooth and pebble

you tree bark, scuffed up macadam where were they to see her and begin to call out

would you 

recognize behind the tailpipes and skylarks, falling anew the sky to earth’s unused refuse

the fuselage of the refused sorrow’s dance    the foxtrot still sooth as you watch from the sidelines 

gravity takes her far travel    un-bone the floor from the music    the rafters from the gone

the countermeasure, the gravity grandmother’s sewing kit and black-spit bright shoes

her dead pulling up their socks unbox grandpa’s ghosts the drinks must be made, anew 


a requirement, the science in the pew the light of the book’s binding where words tug and tag 

at you, the gamble on gambolling     as the earth hastens, the red clay

the soles up in the mud, the hen’s eggs cracked long ago and the hound realizes the licking 

creak of the long slow leak of life let leaf-by-leaf go upon the creak and the crawfish

when you spoke of the openness of things,     between your knees, the child braving fear off a summer cliff

another child falling apart by a hydrant’s spay another whose mother lost a key in a trailer, dying 

of the crooked light and paper, scissor, rock racqueting over a field of rusted crops     cops grown weary

as weeds pulled up-tight behind the bodega a murder of ravens descend and the quaking ascends

the postal train away in fright the land buckles and the feathers bathing the bottom of scampering feet 

she rubs soft stones through her toes to ease the aftershocks     auntie’s prescription

to recall the spinning in a dislocated room clinging as mama-ma and papa danced and clanged 

around each other’s waist Spanish moss wedded to a tree, unkempt at night, there they were

and we, three bowed on our knees ripening the black fruit in the sun once bronzed, so

there was this poem and not the other nothing really done right the caps screwed on tight

and what other mistaken taken with our eyes closes and our teeth clenched and feeling the dark of night


where the break between the vowels and the plow, the silence and the rolled r, is

where is the break between the poem that first turned-up and the poem at the end of the page

where is the break between the pronouns and the sleeves unrolled, selves

where is the break between traditional and simplified, the language of languor

where is the break between the space of light outside and the hullabaloo under the door

where is the chariot under the sun run us


if upon a night late in Spring language wobbles away in a cart of rain and all the rest

if you stood right there between the shadow of the man and the stone wall    and whispered

carry her with you, old man take the stories under your arms and tuck them under a porch 

unplow the seeds in the fields and push them through a pill bright on a tongue 

swallow, swallow

swallow everything away until the dying and the day is done

your heart people multitudinous and flaked by finger and dew


and the dancers over the oak floors    the stars stomping bright-right on the tin roofs, sway      

and lovers risk limb and loss and lamentation    long stories uncoil and lives untie  

language lay seadrift and the bone-twine too     unwinds certainty,  as we all bank away

hear the world crack, fledgling bamboo.