On Purgatorio I
Go with this man; see that you gird his waist
With a smooth
reed; take care to bathe his face…
(trans. By Mark Musa)
Sometimes mercy fell all the way down and made tiny windows
in the fields. And sometimes it simply hovered in the seven times twenty panes of glass. It’s not that I
couldn’t stand such utter selflessness— one thing passing into another across the distance— it’s just
that the sun resembled more a burning kite than star and stained the building with the pinks and muted oranges, muted yellows,
of its raging sorrow. Still, it held me there, winter sunset, and stood me helpless. The beauty was in the fuel
of the thing. How each window banked like ignited water, the red bricks riffling in the perfect residue of seconds…
Years later, it was my daughter wandering casually in to watch me bathing that undid me. How she played with the stacked
towels awhile, toothpaste, soap, until this game bored her and she turned to me to wash my face and hair as only a child can:
in the frank, religious spirit of cleansing, nursing. Awed, I let her scrub me. I let the grimed water sheet me
like a radiant cloak until this too bored her and she wandered back to play with toys, left me chilled above the whirr of
traffic. I was in the car again. It was 1968. The dream-time was all around me spilling the others’
blood, the car that held us such a poor kite to the hill’s wind. I remember waking upside down above the pivot
and knowing nothing of time but a kind of hurry-up to save the cell-life, my father’s borrowed jacket on another scrunched
beside me in the filtering light… Witless, our ritual cleansings, the actual timings: a second window
flared beneath me on the bitter earth. I dropped and hurried toward it, crawled hands and knees into the charity and
utter coarseness that was ditch grass.
-from Message to
Be Spoken into the Left Ear of God 2004, first appeared in American Literature Review
Message to Be Spoken into the Left Ear of God
This is the child drowning: face-up
in an amniotic pool of tap water:
my crucible, liquid garment; eyes spanked open in the rocking
inches of
light.
Above me: my mother’s face torn, her print dress blown
to flame; refraction making me seem—
at least to her, looking down—
A macrocephalic—
like those in the ward my sister was rubied to
when a neighbor
rammed her straight down hard— bumper to hip— to the packed snow
of Dolores Avenue,
branches scarring the dome of sky like the cracks in her
skull, or like the veins in the policeman’s face
when he jumped
downstream into chunks
of ice to catch a neighbor girl like a toy Ophelia. Her body
in his pale blue arms as limp and blue as grief, her
coat tails dripping
above the steaming current.
Tadpole— minnow— knife blade—
tag of flesh— layer of bone— my father’s
face finally astonished,
finally raised—
forehead piercing a nail angling from a joist. Oh, these
crucifixions
staining the fingers, tasting of raw sewage, fish,
cicadas like a giant
rust in the trees,
40,000 ticking Geigers, and not one rock
to set them off; rather, as if our bones in sleep were their decaying
mineral, the
marrow gone soft, gone nuclear. The way the heart shrinks, and
veins go flat as dying
rivers. Or twist in swirls of blue elastic.
The bath water drawn,
the liquid steaming, melting the crude
minerals just beginning
to line
the child’s brain, hair drifting in the gentle
slosh. The body—
pale, naked, wingless.
How I hovered once like a sea-
horse in my mother’s womb. And then dropped out screaming.
-from Message to Be Spoken into
the Left Ear of God 2004
