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I have come
not to beg nor barter but to enter.
Who are you seeking?
The past
opens and opens, fleshing me
with loss.
I descend
to find my way,
I who am
haunted and a haunting.
What are you willing to abandon?
In the before, I continue:
a woman carrying on with the dishes,
the dusting, the sweeping.
But here, I am the voice of the petitioner.
Dearest, who was once of earth,
Dearest, whose departure has cleft me,
Dearest, who was my country,
my soil, my sun and sky,
every migration
is a bird taking wing.
Is this the place you seek?
And if at last I arrive,
will I find you in that room
with every window like the soul
flung open and flooded
with sounds of the distant sea.
And if I spill
out into the yard, will she be still
there, the child who was me
set down in the grass,
watching the stars blinkering
on and off, their light burning
with the knowledge of death.
How will you carry this?
I will have to use the flowers to address you.
Wild-blooming frangipani (your cloying scent marks me).
Pointillist-starred ixora (I braid you into my hair).
Indigo-blue plumbago (you obliterate the sky).
Lignum vitae (you foretell all histories).
Roses that grow ragged along the shore (stay with me).
How will you return to the living?
Called back by the susurrating wind and sea.
Called back by the roots of my hair, dirt
beneath my nails, the body’s sweat and stink.
Called back by their voices, yours
still clenched in my fist. Called back
to all that is matter, bone, and skin,
what fragment of you survives in me
as I open my mouth to speak?
Reincarnation, life everlasting-- call it whatever you will-- it will not change the facts: we are ashes of stellar death. And, in the end, wishing on shooting stars is like pinning your hopes on the last sound of the whistle trailing off, last chord of the train sparking on the tracks then fading into the dark.
In my time, I was a girl who like to spree. The whole world would open fi mi if I shift mi hips to strain the fabric of mi skirt, just so. Still, I did learn mi lesson where love concern: if snake bite yu, when yu see even lizard, crawling with him belly on ground, yu run. Now the gal come to mi, say she fall in love with man who have a plan fi change. But she nuh notice him also carry gun? And, lawd, how she nuh see who running the show and who keeping house same way?
When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
that distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.
looking over the plums, one by one
lifting each to his eyes and
turning it slowly, a little earth,
checking the smooth skin for pockmarks
and rot, or signs of unkind days or people,
then sliding them gently into the plastic.
whistling softly, reaching with a slim, woolen arm
into the cart, he first balanced them over the wire
before realizing the danger of bruising
and lifting them back out, cradling them
in the crook of his elbow until
something harder could take that bottom space.
I knew him from his hat, one of those
fine porkpie numbers they used to sell
on Roosevelt Road. it had lost its feather but
he had carefully folded a dollar bill
and slid it between the ribbon and the felt
and it stood at attention. he wore his money.
upright and strong, he was already to the checkout
by the time I caught up with him. I called out his name
and he spun like a dancer, candy bar in hand,
looked at me quizzically for a moment before
remembering my face. he smiled. well
hello young lady
hello, so chilly today
should have worn my warm coat like you
yes so cool for August in Chicago
how are things going for you
oh he sighed and put the candy on the belt
it goes, it goes.
For the first time tonight,
as I put my wife to bed
I didn't have to shove her off me.
She turned away in her sleep.
I wondered what was wrong with my chest.
I felt it, and the collar bone
spiked up, and where she'd rest
her cheek were ribs.
Who wants to cuddle a skeleton?
My skeleton wandered from the house
and out onto the street.
He came, after much wandering, to the edge of a bay
where a long bridge headed out—
the kind that hangs itself with steel
and sways as if the wind could take
away its weight.
There were mountains in the distance—
triangles of cardboard—
or perhaps the mist was tricking his eyes.
The instant the mist made him doubtful,
it turned to rain.
The rain covered everything. The holes
in his face were so heavy
he wondered if the water was thickening—
if he was leaching into them.
He panicked. Perhaps he was gunked up
with that disgusting paste,
flesh, all over again.
If I were alive I'd have told him
I was nothing like what he was feeling—
that the rain felt more like
the shell of a crab
than the way I'd held him.
That it felt more like him.
But I wasn't alive—
I was the ghost in the bridge
willing the cars to join me,
telling them that death was not wind,
was not weight,
was not mist,
and certainly not the mountains—
that it was the breaking apart,
the replacement of who, when, how, and where
with what.
When my skeleton looked down
he was corrupted
in the femur by fracture,
something swelling within.
Out of him leaked pink moss.
Water took it away.
You put a bag around your head and walked into the river.
You
walked into the river with a bag around your head and you were
never dead
game on the banks of your
mental styx
for the double
audience
of smoke—
—
You pressed a coin into his palm and stepped across the water.
You
stepped across the water with a hand on his arm and he was
silent and kind as you
shoved off, toward the smoky coils
of the greek-seeming dead—
You’d been trying to sleep.
Found yourself here
in the mythocryptic land—
The river
—
had widened to a lake. You were anchored
in the shallow boat
by his faceless weight—
And on the green shore you could see their vapored
residue, how they could
smell it, those two―if you
slit your wrist you could make them speak.
If you
—
slit your wrist you might be able to sleep.
Grief.
Grief.
Handing you back
your coin.