Find and share the perfect poems.
At the columbarium dug
by hand, a man points to where rock
doves would be brought to nest, their eggs
tended by priests, and the cave locked
at sundown, guarded by hired
knives. The flock meant meat for the dry
times; saltpeter; yolks needed to bind
portraits to walls, to raise a sky
gilded with violets and myrrh.
Tonight, my mother paints her nails
black—a shade she names, “Dark Matter.”
She numbers what’s left of her cells,
tells us of this burning inside
her knees, laughs a promise to fight.
Not vinegar. Not acid. Not
sugarcane pressed to mortar by
fist, but salt: salt, the home taste; salt,
the tide; salt, the blood. Not Holy
Ghost, but a saint of coral come
to life in the night crossing a
field of brambles and thorns, the camps
of pirates beat back to the bay
with hornets. Not Santo Niño.
And not a belt of storms, but this:
girls singing, an avocado
in each open palm, courting doves;
a moth drawn to the light of our
room you take to be your father.
For X.
From the shallows our son watches me play
dead. He sits on river rocks chucking sand,
burying strawberries while I float down-
stream, breath wound bright in the gut, a body
both here and of other waters. The day
he was born, midwives touched your face, your hands,
tested nerve and pulse, dripped saline along
your thigh, numbered blades—their ceremony
for the first cuts, before swaddling blankets,
fever syrups, bath time and mud. These are
places the boy is ticklish: lunette
of the earlobe kneecaps madrigal fat
of his belly collarbone toes. These words
he knows, but will not say: yes horse sleep white.
*
Again the boy cries himself hoarse
as we sing through these hours right
before dawn. First the alphabet,
then “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,”
then “The Great Pretender.” Our words
like foxes, like milk teeth. We can’t
hold him quiet. His body must,
they say, learn now about hunger,
about being alone. So we
hum and shhh into the yellow
bruise of Sunday, melodies the
shape of bluets and yearlings, blood
pudding and this worry, this awe
we have no name for—
*
When he asks, make no mention of those names
we saved for the children we lost—his ghost
siblings, their phantom initials. Of tests
and lemongrass, nettle leaf and sharps, forms
in triplicate, clinics painted with lambs,
comets, maps to nerve meridians, hearts:
say nothing. Never speak of that quiet
after the kicking stopped. Believe in time
he’ll learn our cells betray each miracle
and wild conundrum they’re coded to bear.
If he needs an answer, give him morning
mass off W. 16th: how aisle and chancel
roared with lilies and cornets; how we dared
a new unknown to find us, there, in song.
Coral-bells purpled the fallen sycamore leaves, dead, the dead
versus those who attempted death, versus those who effectively
fashioned out of such attempts a style akin to electric guitar
shimmer swelling and unswelling like starlings when they first
lift off, or like stars when, from their fixed sway, they come
suddenly loose, any man letting at last go of a career spent
swallowing—trying to—catastrophe’s jewel-studded tail, un-
swallowable, because
holy, in the way of fanfare, its gift for
persuasion, how it can make of what’s ordinary, and therefore
flawed of course, a thing that’s holy, for a time it seemed so,
didn’t restlessness seem to be, little god of making, no less
impossible in the end than any of the gods, where’s the holiness,
they sleep never, they tire infrequently, to be tired bores them,
distraction refined by damage would be their drug of choice
hands down, if they could choose, even they don’t get to.