The widow colors the sky
The ground, the trees,
The winds with cold and heat
Of all that cannot be spoken,
Of spirits tethered to stone.
You may never know she is there.
She may wear the red nose.
She may laugh with you.
She may hold out her hands to help.
All so you are not overwhelmed by her presence.
She hides within her weeds.
Sometimes she hides within the willows.
She may smell of pomegranates
Or roses at midnight,
The scents betray her presence.
But you will not see her arms and hands
Covered in thorns and trickling with blood,
The tears of her body, dripping away,
Speaking in tongues no one can understand,
As she stands alone.
She sees history through a broken prism
Of her words never strong enough to bind
Love to prayers weighted with magic enough
To fly straight to God’s ear, to be heard,
To be answered, to raise flowers of miracles.
In the end, the widow is left,
Singing colors of grief.
When all the praise singers have left her
In the muddy soil leavings of wicked tongues,
Gone on to daily lives, the day to day,
The widow stands,
Singing colors of grief,
Covered in thorns.
Consequences of time
Climb and mount
About the throat,
Following the path
Of arteries and veins,
And as if by magic,
Enter into the blood
To provide a dram bit
Of bitter choking poison
To the will of moving blood
That slows and stills
In the knowing.
I wait for spring—
When days run long,
While hope emerges
Green from the earth
Warmed by a sun
Who knows the spell
A gentle warmth brings
With a smoothness of breath
Taken in the calmness of colors
Basking in the light of a day
Nourished by winter’s ashes.
Caught in the evening downpour,
I am washed clean of summer.
Summer’s red rock, red dirt dreams
Sluiced from me with this autumnal drenching.
Morning greets me with a cool hand
Of sunshine upon my brow.
Autumn whispers of a harvest
Under skies of bluest topaz.
A clear, clean, honest reaping
In days yet to be had.
The daughters of Lilith condemned
To chance a gory laden death once again,
All the while, standing vilified as they
Who wear the mantle of Lilith’s power have always been.
Tomorrow and all tomorrows after,
The daughters of Lilith will rise
With the glory and power of their mother,
Breaking the chains men make
Seeking to steal the power of Lilith residing in her daughters
Thus, breaking their spirits to subservient acquiesce.
But each of Lilith’s daughters will remind
Such fearful little men
Their mother was made before Eve
And fashioned of the earth as well.
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.
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.
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