Glossolalia

My baby brandishes a wooden knife
meant to halve a wooden shallot

as he hollers his newest word. Knife.
Look at my son, flashing

his dagger, jamming it into plush
animals. Knife, knife. Look at him,

oblivious to the weapons
littering his lineage or, God forbid,

possessed by them. Can the babies
planted in the dirt of our bodies

absorb the torments buried there?
My gentle, watchful child

wants all the knives. But some days,
everywhere, blue. The bear, blue.

The bells, blue, the car, the cup,
the light. I marvel at my son,

who marvels at the sky—blue, blue
no matter how gray the bully of clouds.

And this is all I want.
Look at my son laughing at the rain.

Look how he prods the window
with his knife, insisting

we cut up the storm, demanding 
the blue back into view.

Elegy Composed in the New York Botanical Garden

Catmint—tubular, lavender, an ointment
to blur the scar, bloom the skin. My mouth has begun
the hunt for words that heal.

In the garden, I am startled by a cluster
of sun-colored petals marked, Radiation.
Piles of radiation. Orange radiation, huddled together

like families bound by a hospital-bright morning.
And behind them: a force of yuccas
called Golden Swords. A bush or mound

of sheath-like leaves sprouting from a proud center.
And isn’t that the plot?
First the radiation, then the golden sword.

I remember, incurably,
your mother. The laughter that flowered
from her lips. I’m sorry I have no good words

to honor her war. It crumbled me to watch you
overwhelmed by her face
in the daffodils outside your childhood home.
 

This City

could use more seraphs.
Anything with wings, really—

a falcon, a swallowtail.
Ravenous for marvels, I slit open
a chrysalis. Inside,
no caterpillar mid-morph.
Only its ghost in a horror of cells.
I pinch the luminous mash
of imaginal discs
and shudder, imagining
the mechanics of disintegration.
The wormy larva—whole,
then whorled. A wonder
it did not die. Even now,
smeared against my skin, it beams

like the angel in the tomb
prepared to proclaim a rising.

Related Poems

One Fire, Quenched with Another

             1.
Pained as he was when he gazed 
upon his father’s face, he held his gaze.

             2.
Toward what he’d never known, he walked,
somehow both arrogant & begging.

The purple of his father’s robes, like a bruise. 

             3.
As a river, over time, can forge
a way through stone, so
absence bore through him,
leaving a valley where his voice
echoes off the canyon walls. 

             4.
His mind had narrowed until all it held
was an idea of father, until so fixed on the idea
his mind seemed under siege. Inside him hummed
a longing, one he felt compelled to fix, so named it ​flaw.

             5.
What the boy wanted:
to finally know his father’s face.
Evidence, at last, of his origin. 

             6.
Felt within, a longing.
Felt and therefore knew
a weakness he wanted to master. 

             7.
A desire to know, and a belief
he deserved to,

these were the human parts of him.

             8. 
Fiery, Dawnsteed, Scorcher, Blaze–

the horses the father owned,

the horses the father, knowing he would fail, let his son steer–

             9.
is this devotion?

             10.
To master, control, rein in;
hoping this might prove him 
a man, perhaps, a god.

             11.
There are gaps knowing cannot fill.

             12.
What boy has not dreamt himself a noble son,
has not prematurely thought himself a man?

             13.
                           He lost control of the reins
& the horses did what one expects
from animals whose lives had always been 
tightly squeezed between two fists:

             14.
breaking from the path they’d always known,

             15.
they galloped nearer to that world from which they’d been kept, 

             16.
not out of malice but a kind of mercy

             17.
for the world the father feared the horses would destroy.

             18.
Finding himself at the mercy of what he’d sought–

             19.
gone too far to turn back, gone far beyond his father now
with further still to go, ignorant of the names
of the horses behind whom he was now dragged like the tail
of a comet hurtling toward earth, as in all directions
he sees the destruction he’d caused:

the flames licking trees at their roots, licking
dry the ocean’s mouth, licking the faces
of each living thing until they’d turned to ash,

until the world without grew hotter than the world within,
until a dizzying heat rose from the soil, until in his feet

             20.
the boy could feel the world ablaze–

             21.
free me from these reins
he cried perhaps to god, 
perhaps to father, 

             22.
the difference indecipherable, more or less insignificant

             23.
for even though he’d met him, the boy still knew himself

             24.
fatherless, godless, no less abandoned than he’d been.

             25.
The world to which, for better or worse, he once belonged, now gone, 

             26.
he belonged nowhere… 

             27.
To save what could be saved, to salvage what had not been lost,
to punish his failure to master what no other ever had: the boy

             28.
was struck dead & buried

             29.
beside a river, which began again to flow toward the distant mouth 

             30.
out of which, it would finally empty.

Black Swan

I told the boy I found him under a bush.
What was the harm? I told him he was sleeping   
And that a black swan slept beside him,
The swan’s feathers hot, the scent of the hot feathers   
And of the bush’s hot white flowers
As rank and sweet as the stewed milk of a goat.   
The bush was in a strange garden, a place   
So old it seemed to exist outside of time.   
In one spot, great stone steps leading nowhere.
In another, statues of horsemen posting giant stone horses   
Along a high wall. And here, were triangular beds   
Of flowers flush with red flowers. And there,   
Circular beds flush with white. And in every bush   
And bed flew small birds and the cries of small birds.   
I told the boy I looked for him a long time   
And when I found him I watched him sleeping,   
His arm around the swan’s moist neck,   
The swan’s head tucked fast behind the boy’s back,   
The feathered breast and the bare breast breathing as one,   
And then very swiftly and without making a sound,   
So that I would not wake the sleeping bird,   
I picked the boy up and slipped him into my belly,   
The way one might slip something stolen   
Into a purse. And brought him here….
And so it was. And so it was. A child with skin   
So white it was not like the skin of a boy at all,
But like the skin of a newborn rabbit, or like the skin   
Of a lily, pulseless and thin. And a giant bird   
With burning feathers. And beyond them both   
A pond of incredible blackness, overarched
With ancient trees and patterned with shifting shades,   
The small wind in the branches making a sound
Like the knocking of a thousand wooden bells….   
Things of such beauty. But still I might
Have forgotten, had not the boy, who stands now   
To my waist, his hair a cap of shining feathers,
Come to me today weeping because some older boys   
Had taunted him and torn his new coat,   
Had he not, when I bent my head to his head,   
Said softly, but with great anger, “I wish I had never   
Been born. I wish I were back under the bush,”   
Which made the old garden rise up again,   
Shadowed and more strange. Small birds   
Running fast and the grapple of chill coming on.   
There was the pond, half-circled with trees. And there   
The flowerless bush. But there was no swan.   
There was no black swan. And beneath   
The sound of the wind, I could hear, dark and low,   
The giant stone hooves of the horses,   
Striking and striking the hardening ground.

Hoodie

A gray hoodie will not protect my son
from rain, from the New England cold.

I see the partial eclipse of his face
as his head sinks into the half-dark

and shades his eyes. Even in our
quiet suburb with its unlocked doors,

I fear for his safety—the darkest child
on our street in the empire of blocks.

Sometimes I don’t know who he is anymore
traveling the back roads between boy and man.

He strides a deep stride, pounds a basketball
into wet pavement. Will he take his shot

or is he waiting for the open-mouthed
orange rim to take a chance on him? I sing

his name to the night, ask for safe passage
from this borrowed body into the next  

and wonder who could mistake him
for anything but good.