She will never fall to earth again
After soaring among the stars,
The planets a blur. No.
No. She will never swim
In the deepest oceans,
Cavorting with dolphins and whales. No.
No. Never will her soul fly,
Brushing shoulders with angels,
Their wings touching upon her face. No.
No. Never these things.
Never these dangerous things again.
Never allowing illusions to gain sway. No.
No. She will plant her feet firmly in the ground.
Her heart cemented in her chest. Yes.
Yes. That once mighty waterfall
Has slowed to a trickle
As there no longer exist
Any waterfall wishes.
Marshal forces
Of the earth, moon, orbits of planets,
Laws of time,
All we hold mighty and true,
Stop everything in its tracks,
Turn it all back
Before the start of any of it,
Falling away,
Marshaled from memory.
I first wrote this a few years ago after reading Elizabeth Bishop’s work once again. Well, after revisiting Mary Oliver and gaining familiarity with Pablo Neruda this summer, I once again returned to Bishop’s work and then had to re-watch Reaching for the Moon. So I decided to dig this one out and tweak it and revise.
In this thing called losing,
Bishop said we become masters
And that losing isn’t a disaster.
No, not a disaster.
Losing socks and such stuff.
I’ve lost earrings, bracelets,
Expensive ones too, didn’t care
Beyond maybe a minute or two,
And never was it a disaster.
And no pain beyond a stab of nostalgia
Did I have upon saying goodbye
To three houses and two cities,
And never did I feel it a disaster.
And yes, it was no disaster
To bury my mother,
A father who really wasn’t,
The man who really was,
First one brother, then the other,
Then lastly, a wife.
With each, my body and soul
Savaged by a catastrophic hurricane, yes.
But no, no disaster.
No disaster is it, I’ll admit,
For a tiny bit of soul to erode
As I buried each.
But nothing, nothing did I ever master.
Except, maybe this—
I did not look for them-
Looking to forget them
Since they were gone,
Emptied of this earth.
No, I did not look to forget
While driving home
In darkness under a full moon
Lighted with regret
Of a new unfamiliar scent.
Yet the swirling of this sad scent
Is no, no real disaster.
No real disaster is it—
That I look to forget
A lost return now.
A return to life
Captured, fleeting, lost--
Filled with a scent
Of hope or a fool’s thought—
Matters not but now lost.
And in this thing
Called losing,
In which I am well-schooled,
As are we all,
I have tried to make an art,
To make an art of all this loss.
Yes, this may be no real disaster,
But Bishop lied.
There is no art in losing,
No art at all,
That I can find to master.
The feel of some bold mystic chaos
Contained within the fire of kisses
Traveling along the boundaries
Where lived an identity
You lost long ago—
To feel that chaotic fire
Burn away the identity
You wear today—
Feel passionate softness
Twist within and around
Leaving bruises unseen
And you undone
In twisting mystic
Chaos of fire.
Haunting seen
In darkening clouds
Of chrysalis dreams
Where wanting,
Where desiring,
Haunt seen
Cease existing--
In this capturing
No ring
pierced through
Butterfly wings
Dripping still
From newly emerging
Dreams not tended.
What is it that you wish to know?
How someone could live with
The edges of a life chipped away,
Breath not taken, suffocated,
Heart stilled,
Walking dead
Through the days of life,
Just so onlookers believe
The pretense they wish to see?
While I, struggling for air,
For the beating rhythms of life,
Having lived too long inside a shrinking skin,
Become petrified wood, stone,
Armored in minerals.
Only so close.
Only so close.
For I have lived years and years
Of rings and more rings,
All mineralized,
Surrounding the core
Of me. Nothing
Could truly touch,
Know the center.
Nothing ever did
Perhaps, ever will.
It is easy to live
As stone.
We thwart not the sun or the moon,
the movement of planets,
the coming of rains or drought.
We neither thwart
our birth nor death.
We try to thwart what our hearts feel
And the desires with which it plagues us,
But our hearts feel and desire still.
Even our tears cannot be thwarted--
though they may not fall,
the tears fall unseen.
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Hearing The Mermaids Sing 