Perhaps at twelve, as Mary perhaps was,
I may have said yes out of love,
Or at least I would have thought that’s what it was.
Consent, to faith, is a strange drug.
When Gabriel left and silence fell,
And the impossible came to dwell
In such a space as small as me,
I may have felt the infinite
Reflecting on the price of love
That weds it to its opposite—
How could it ever (always) be
That women house such mystery?
I am that She who slaked her need
Underneath the apple tree,
Who cursed the whole of womankind
Through our yet unbroken bloodline.
“Yes I would do it all again,”
Say both pride and humility—
And that is because the two are one
As long as we continue to bleed.
When a soul finds its home
In the watery nest
Of a woman’s bones and her hands come to rest
On the dome of her carriage,
She fancies herself as the giver of life,
Always misunderstanding
The nature of time as a circle
That sweeps through the middle
Of bodies and dream worlds, but witness:
The stem cells of babies are left behind
In the mother’s blood for the rest of her life
And they rush to the site of her injury—
When her heart gives way,
They return to weave
The magic they carried into this world
To sustain the first rhythm that they ever heard.
The wide dominion of innocence
Finds its freedom in this and only this—
When you spend your whole life giving children the tools
To dismantle the very specter of you.
With hips like a rose,
She gives life to the earth.
When she opens her lips,
Seven rivers emerge
And they roar like a chorus
Of angels whose wings
Beat in time to the tune
Of the song that she sings
To the babe in her arms
As she learns how to dream.
Her soul is a lean-to
With stars peeking in
Through the slats in the roof
She’s been meaning to mend
But her tasks are forgotten
With each little cry.
So they breathe in the starlight
And sleep through the night.
What is this flesh with us
That beats its chest with us
When death is just a set
Of growing compromises?
The courtyard swims with cocktail napkins
As the movers pack up all the rooms that we were trapped in.
Silence unspools
Backwards from the grave
Opening up the space between words
By one deep breath each day.
In one of the quietest rooms in my mind
There is always a standing column of light
From a bare, open window, scattering gently
Across a gleaming hardwood floor.
I happen into this hidden room
In certain of my dreams, and in between
The scaffolding that offers me
Access to my memories.
The quiet center of a life
May hide behind a turn of mind.
One day perhaps the fish will swim
Among the Lincoln Monument,
Recalling through ancestral blood
The petals in the rose garden.
The wheel turns and the cotton spins—
Words become threads
With which to weave
A net to catch our Being in.
Time is like a two-way mirror—
We are there and also here.
