Distant Bodies in Sweet Repose

One evening, cold but fair,
The moon striding its nightly course,
A comet came to rest its head
Beside my bed, a weary rider from his horse.

A phantasm, perhaps? Or vision blur?
A lighted shadow trick of eye?
I could feel its cold, its ice, its heat against my cheek,
an earthbound pilgrim from the sky.

Though in appearance tired and worn,
Its head a’slump, its tail slouched,
It pulsed the room with force and light,
My body bright, its being a heavenly shout.

My body losing its command collapsed.
I could not rise to be its host,
Though I longed to peer into a piece of cosmos.
Would morning dissolve this nighttime ghost?

In the presence of a celestial body
I froze, my desires parting like a wake:
One part longed, one part feared,
My body jeered; was I in dream, or awake?

Though in awe and though in fear
I looked and saw the tired wonder,
And some deep hospitable bone within me rose.
I approached with blankets instead of shudders.

Tucking in this distant body
Like tucking in a nuclear device,
But not unlike tucking in my niece,
I at peace, the gentle hum of comet ice.

My head sank into pillow deep.
The quiet of a comet filled my sleep.
My heart no longer leapt.
Two distant bodies sweetly slept.

Note: I originally wrote this back at the end of 2014 (I think) and later attempted publishing it in a local literary journal. This is the draft I submitted.

Late Saturday Afternoon While My Daughters are Napping I Contemplate a Replica of my Femur

I hold a molded plastic femur in my hands like a hilt or club or rifle, looking down
then aiming

its long engineered shaft at the column of a tree reaching down into the earth
but also reaching up

into the pocket of the sky. With the tips of my fingers I feel the architecture
and dream

of when God dreamed up my femur in the mountain cathedral caverns of his mind
in between two pillars,

both rooted into the geology of the cave and rocketing up to support the dome
of the cavern sky—

then I press, with a finger or two, beneath my skin surface, through the thickness of layers
of epidermis and dermis,

of fascia and muscle, past nerve endings to find the linea aspera, like a horizon
or a mountain ridge line,

and touching the greater trochanter, an anchor for tendons and muscles: the hope
of forward movement

through space and time and I think of my daughters, two sleeping bodies, floating,
in a sense, in space

as the earth glides its way through a kind of emptiness being pulled by the sun, their femurs, unbroken, busy with bustling

osteoclasts and osteoblasts making and unmaking their bones. My femur a slim pillar
of milk and marrow

was once threatened by a man’s head and helmet that came smashing in and my femur gave just enough, like bamboo;

it did not break. I bend the model femur like a bow—the plastic gives only a little.
Then I think

of the manufacturing plant and the man whose job it is to press the button that shoots
the composite goo

into the metal cast, probably taken from a cadaver dug up a couple hundred years ago;
in the realm of windowless

repetitive innovation he breathes the fractal air of shards of steel and security.
I stand and walk.

There it is, my femur, rooted into my foot and branching into the pocket of my pelvis,
this great transmitter

of force; the lines of stress of the boney matrix refuse to meander but map out
this life of adapting.

This near flawless bastion of blood and citadel of my leg, only the occasional
pause to thank its creator—

How many miles have you taken me? How many blows have you saved me from?
How long you've held me up.

Cow Life

Why does a cow complain of clouds?
Her plain is vast and reaches round.
Her eye is fixed upon the dome,
The grass below her cloven hoof.

She tries to wander far and wide
But looming up above her eye
Where birds do zig and zag and cry
The sky, the sky, the sky, the sky!

But fixed to ground and anchored fast
To green and dirt, she's stuck by force
Of course her feet can move and graze
but heart entombed in ribs and fence.

The vulture-beast outside the gate:
alicking jowls, eyes that bite;
her prison, freedom, fortress, life.
Her sorrow, pleasure, living blind.

Order

When cyclones twist and turn and scream and raze
A poured out world across an empty lot
A vacant face with empty eyes left staring
A mess of disconnected nerve endings.

And waters fill the riptide of your gut
Your son left on a wind that came from somewhere
I lost my father at a gambler's table
My insides blindly sprawled and left there turning.

A girl exploded; disappeared into the walls
Her heart then built a shiny meadow wand'ring
Below the floorboards there she kept in hiding
The bodies of memories still and dying.

"I did not ask for this," I hear her say
the chaos creeping in between the slats.
We gaze and gaze upon the land worked out
A careful, unseen hand through out.

Development

The liquid is a potion
but not a truth serum,
it only reveals.

Bathing the paper in the chemicals
in the sealed-off room
I am surrounded by nothing.

A boy in the gloaming.
A man is a gadfly gathering,
always gathering.

A boy wanders the night paths
amidst the shadow trees
and star-branches.
A man sits pondering,
always pondering.

A boy subdues a forest
passing through its tunnels
and mud pits
skimming and plumbing
a creek's mysteries.

A man is left with nothing
always nothing.

I hang the photo to drip
dry in the dark
and leave into all the somethings
rushing like a creek.


This is the third draft for this poem.

__________________________________________

Untitled

A boy in the gloaming.
A man is a gadfly gathering,
always gathering.

A boy wanders the night paths
amidst the shadow trees
and star-branches.
A man sits pondering,
always pondering.

A boy subdues a forest
passing through its tunnels
and mud pits
skimming and plumbing
a creek's mysteries.

A man is left with nothing
always nothing.

This is the second draft of this poem. The first draft of this poem was written on June 24, 2019 with minor changes here.

The Trinity

One in three, three in one,
Father, Spirit, Son.

Yahweh, Ghost, Son of Man;
Aweful, terrible, little lamb.

Fire, love, and light;
Gateway, barrier, and bright.

Tempest, darkness, pillar of fire;
Fulfiller/crusher of desire.

Burning bush, angel of death
Column of smoke, baby breath.

Bridegroom, artist, sovereign hand;
Lion of Judah, slain lamb.

Terrifying, cute;
As loud as star, as deaf as mute.

Comforter, challenger, wrestler strange,
Infringer, destabilizer, changing and unchanged.

To Abram three strangers on the path of war;
To Mary for kings to adore.

Our genesis and end;
Judge and friend.


Note: Above is the 2nd draft (still unfinished). 1st draft written in fragments over the course of a month in February 2019.

The Day Katherine G.’s Ears Fell Off

Paint drips down canvas like sweat, 

down a cool glass in the summer.

The colors vibrant in adjacency like the leaf of spring

Under the new honey of a bumble bee,

Sweet with the mirth of harmonious activity

The hum of the earth in a brush stroke

A melody drifting through a gentle breeze

Something you can smell in your ears

And hear in your nose

And touch with your soul

Drown in the sound until you can breathe,

Lost until you can find your way.

The paint dries. The canvas waits.

Something is happening outside.

Fibers and roots interwoven through earth

A tight chaotic braid, fraying on one end

The other well anchored, but the source

Of its stability remains buried under soil.

A unseen  tombstone, unmarked and nameless

Everything underneath wants to rise up

Through the millennia, bursting forth

From a slumber of gradual disremembrance

And dissonance like a bell that once clang

And its clanging vibrations are subtle trimmers

Somewhere in outer space

But now the air is still, or is it that we have

Not the ears to hear.

Leah and I wrote this together on a date night. I believe we wrote it just after we were married... probably sometime in 2011? Only minor edits made here.

Meanwhile

My tears, to my father, smelled like the field
at his fingertips in early morning light
that kind that doesn't drain but lingers.

He was in his mid thirties, a practicing doc
who discovered what his weight against floor
with his kneed caps in between felt like,
and I in another state, a baby. Comprehension
abstract and fuzzy.

Only playing in the snow was solace on the solstice
the way Antarctica can make you feel small and suffocate you
at different times, he was preparing for business
plotting the piling of money whereas I didn't even know what money was
or how it can delude you or save you or both at the same time.

It was a full mean year of skin cells pulled apart
at their plasma seems and nose bleeds
and dancing for no good reason except for sadness
and tunnels that shifted for all the wrong seasons
so things flooded immensely and dread wailed
like thimble thread that doesn't want to be cut
and so it holds on without knowing.