(2020-2021)
1
My abdomen jolts open but I can’t figure out what’s inside a swimming pool? an orchid? a family? I am 99 percent bright viscous intestine I hear something crawl down into my second chakra then out through my first I still can’t see what it is but it carries me slowly through the earth like a deep and heavy star taking up residence at the core so strange and new a great booming home in my ears
1
Here is my hand fighting with my other hand, all my hands are fighting, I’m
a trichotomy of hands, left-right-center (from the top I look like that star exploding),
and now my hands see each other and wave across skies. Booming, as you say, a home.
Light resides in my belly and I love it there, burning on as if I’ve nurtured it myself.
2
I see your hands in the sky somewhere in the pink dusk above Tucson hands fighting not in anger but a kind of wrestling a workout between loves to simply feel one body next to another what if embodied meant dispersal instead of collected? feet running in joy over Brazil a heart in Kansas jumping happily into Illinois oh and that Siberian ribcage doing salsa with a tibia between New Zealand and the moon
2
Enormous body! On Christmas Day I stood in the middle of a small bridge so I could feel
the way the earth might feel poised between the opposites of space and direction and…
from above did I look like two or more or was I gone, my body glazed in snow,
my ribcage claiming all the imagination it needed to salsa down to you in Arizona?
3
Many-bodied in a stream the being on the bridge is she always the same or is she a constant river that flows down the block reattaching to someone who stares out into the world from the next bridge transubstantiated into the miracle of beam me up or down into a cell that runs its course and life from heart to ankle and all the way back we heard a heartbeat today running as fast as any river two hearts in one body
3
Jung says: Love, soul, and God are beautiful and terrible. I agree and throw myself
on the snow to see if I float. Or melt. Or burst. Or freeze. Today I’m in praise mode
for the two hearts walking beside each other, playing banjos or piccolos. And I swear
I hear them sing all the way to the Twin Peaks and back. Love, soul, God. And the body.
4
Earlier today I saw my hands they looked so weathered more earth than flesh tonight they reach into a new year their dirt an echo and counter to words I praise them to the mountains and firecrackers releasing a shout calling out from the midnight hours to the turn of day I sleep with a new life breathe with a new heart dream a catapult into the future
4
And what of the way the body turns to light? Does it turn to light? I think it does.
Happy New Year! Once I walked through Times Square looking for zeros.
It was the year 2000 and they were everywhere.
5
Zeros and four plus one equals five which is where we are today on this the second of our new year where one plus two plus five equals eight a stacking of zeros an infinity of o’s and light from the screen where we watched an empty Times Square and a falling ball fill with confetti the possibility of travel a signal light years away and so close
5
Where shall we take ourselves? How shall we fly? Let’s squeeze our seven bodies
into the ship that lights up our driveway like a tesseract, all escape and velocity.
We’ll sleep here and there, up and down, take turns driving east then north then
east, or west and south then further south—gone (if we go fast enough) forever.
6
Stand with me on the sidewalk where the Cabot Trail meets Fiset don’t step on any cracks place your tongue lightly on the roof of your mouth and send your breath through one nostril then the other now bend your right knee and lift your leg up to your chest hold it there with both hands find your balance a stillness in the ongoing when you close your eyes you will find another velocity a flying squirrel and a flying fish
6
I waited too long to reply. Now the country flies in a hand-basket to you-know-
where. (Not that I can’t say hell, I just don’t want to admit there’s a hell today,
of all days, all days embodied in all the days imaginably embodied in the mirth-
lessness of climbing over a body through a window to rip the soul of a country apart.)
7
Thrown back south from the northern gulf trying to withstand the wall scalers the screams the bearded marauders willing to kill who were those flying fish anyway and why did I think they would protect us from mayhem? it’s almost embarrassing to imagine we could escape because of course we can at least today yet here we stay unarmed with the privilege to believe we could and would be saved
7
Amen.