Cry of the Stars

Little Bean is learning how to grasp
and hasn’t got the hang of it yet;

things keep slipping
through her tiny fingers

and i’m imprudently
melancholic, wondering how soon
she’ll need to learn
to just let them go.

then again

do we ever learn, in the end?
have we ever grasped anything
in the first place?

i’m not strong enough to hold you
against the world, or death,
or even tomorrow—still

i think,
i think

i would like to hold you anyway.

When my mother told me she loved me,
I thought I needed translation.

Sweetheart? she tried, but shook her head.

I looked it up: darling, baby—
Or word by word: heart, liver, treasure, cowrie.

Precious treasure of the liver. Sweet heart
of the child. A music box, a seashell, a dumpling, a blanket,
a pair of cupped hands, a cradle, a womb—

the heart, the liver, the baby
a box for safekeeping, but

is there anything safe about a baby?

Xinganbaobei, she repeated, drawing a circle
at her chest, opening it up, showing me
myself nestled inside, as vital as any viscera:

in me, of me, she said, my sweet baby,
the child of my heart. You know?

And didn’t I?

Late June, and by my apartment porch
the scent of flowered vines sends me back
eleven years, reeling, to a riot of mowed grass
and sunshine on skin:

I’m running through shifting shadows
with you again, while your mother
cuts tomatoes in the kitchen
and the white duck wanders the backyard.

Pale pollen on fingers, clear nectar
lingering on tongue-tips, we ran, breathless
and blurry—

Somewhere beyond the clotheslines I lost you:
dark curls disappeared into billowing white,
eclipsed by heat and wind.

Did I lie down and close my eyes
in the center of that bright and whirling world?

Have I slept for eleven years, or is it now
I am dreaming?

I think of your face behind fluttering sheets,
your mother’s voice at the patio door—

I turn; the wind drifts; I breathe
again, unlocked.

canada goose leaps from the garden pond
into a spring storm, calling like my nana

with an arrowhead stuck at the back of her mouth;

she feels it catch every time she speaks.
she buckles her neck around the pain.

how long can one man elude winter?

go on while I rest, he said, and
she flew south without him.

now she remembers she lost something.

Theodore! she calls through vernal rain,
point of an arrowhead crying across the sky,

looking, looking, looking.

Long months of darkness saw
your careful shaping, each detail intricate
as a passerine’s nest, your snowdrop petal fingers
and sugar maple veins: winter’s
lovestruck gift to summer.

The day you arrived,
Zephyrus whirled his brothers aside and
swept us into his arms, laughing,
while we kissed your new skin like gentle sunlight,
a sudden touch of joy that stirred the daffodils
and woke the sleeping thrushes—

something of you made us wild
with life, and our fevered happiness went singing
like the wind, and we told your name
to the flickering moon, and we whispered it
to the tender rain that fell,

and it tangled in wet branches—
our love among white blossoms, nestled
in the crook of an arm,
some sweet place in the dark
where the dogwoods had begun to bloom.

It is not what is given,
but only your hands,
your hands that are too small

The morning after rain, measure your fingers
against the sidewalk earthworms. Be kind;
this is not a contest.

Find the storm-drain kitten with matted fur
and meet her wild eyes: she is
so stubbornly alive—

Stop wearing sunscreen. Instead,   
learn to braid the rainclouds into your hair
and let them dangle down your back.

your voice is never loud enough,
your dreaming never strong enough,
your shivering too small

Brush and bring the cold kitten home,
while the sunset smiles and burns up the horizon;

then, though the neighborhood peregrines arrive
with eyes big enough to stargaze in,
do not let them in. When you are ready,
they will disappear forever.

And the gilt-clawed wolves in your dreams,
listen to what they tell you,
what they sing beneath the clear light
of the moon:

it is not what is given,
but only your hands—
your lovely, lonely, empty hands,
your hands that are too small.

You have always known red
by its closeness:

you know it in the pinprick
of salmonberry thorn, and the drip of blood
that hugs your fingertip,

the fruit’s sweetness embracing
your tongue, and your tongue itself
an embrace of your mouth, your teeth,
your syllables and sounds.

You only speak red with a clenched throat.

You swallow red on the mesa,
wrapped in its midday swelter, where the heat
curls up in your nostrils, and it
folds around your lungs

and you have heard it screamed,
heard it sung, heard it shaking
in the shell of your ear. When red returns

it tastes like rust, something
you have always known: seal of water
between your palms,

and God’s fingers, light
as a mourning dove’s wing, resting
against your cheek.

I remember the old life dimly,
as if through half-light of the forest itself.
Bold sons like tall shadows around me,
each of us hastening toward the sky
as if to touch, as if to hold.

How suddenly the cutting toppled us
into a new dream! We had heard
that somehow out of us you could beget
yourselves again, so I waited
for a face and eyes, hands and a mouth

but found myself instead like this.
Four knobbed knees
and a single bent board: what was I
to do with these?
Some cruel half-image

you had made of me—
if I could not speak
or even stand, how would I bear
this shame? Nevertheless

the years went by, and hope
grew slowly, a seedling struggling
to raise its head. Every morning

I bowed down and gave
my back for your feet, until at last I shook
under the weight

and one day, lifting your children up
with my stooping body, I knew
I had become like you after all.

I would like to forget
the moment of my birth;
after centuries
in agony, I woke hot-blooded
and glowing with marigold light.
Slowly, I drew in breath
and have been holding it
ever since. Shall I curse my hesitation?
Believe me, I have much to learn
from you, forgetful ones who exhale
without thinking, who are always
putting yourselves back
together: I am so afraid
of emptiness.
Someday, like you, I may sigh.
I may sprout flowers from my belly
to fill my mouth.

Mockingbird puts her wings akimbo and talks
my ear off at the bedroom window. She rambles

the way I imagine my grandmother calling
about her day, how the autumn breeze fluffed
her feathers and reminded her of husband and children,

how much she misses them, how she wishes
they could come home soon.

Languages skip in and out of her mouth
the way rainwater skips between leaves.
I recognize only one.

She waits, perched on the windowsill, disappointed
until I tell her—I only understand
when you say hello. Then

she gets it. She holds my face. She says:
hello hello hello hello.

I. Princess In The Tower

You stand in the wings again, squinting.
It is not stage-light brilliance that blinds you
but the flash of her teeth,
and her quick glance your way as she flickers
across a wooden floor.
Here, in the wings, you could
open your mouth, you could open your arms,
you could open everything that is locked
behind your ribs and fidgeting
inside your stomach and poised
across your knuckles but
the one thing you cannot open

        Autumn in the bogs,
        wet feathered reeds
        bruised and yellow beneath
        cold stumbling fog.
        “Ho! Wanderer!”
        spoke the king.
        “I know what you need.
        Step here, fear not—
        the surface
        will hold.

        “Come, my daughter:
        You are mine. Make no
        mistake. Come,
        we will dine
        on jeweled snakes
        and frogs
        of gold.”

the curtain like a guillotine must drop
mercilessly to the wooden floor,
the curtain that walls you off
from your dreaming,
the curtain bending against
the sun at your bedroom window.

 
II. Lament

        Lo-Ruhamah, Lo-Ammi:
        Lama, lama sabachthani?

The girls in the dressing room sit side-by-side,
the last two left after midnight fled the blitzkrieg
of flurried kisses and rose trophies,
and the whitewashed cinder-block walls
let out a last sigh into the stillness.
Sophie closes her eyes, holds out her hand,
drops her pearl earrings, feels Madalena reach over,
smiles, looks at herself in the streaked mirror
ringed with harsh white lights, realizes
she’s alone, cannot find the earrings again,
spends the rest of the night
staring at her fingers.


III. Birth Of The Betrothed

That lagoon and its lavender houses at dusk,
soft gold light mirrored over the shoreline. We are
beyond it almost before we realize—probably
Tatiana is driving too fast—so you and I slip back later
to dangle our ankles in the water.
Who are you? I ask. Three years ago
you were the kindred soul I never thought I’d lose,
but who have you become?
Are you my brother? My father?
Answer me!

Hoshea the king of clean city streets
did not hesitate, splashed straight down into mud and
had his Oxfords swallowed off his feet;
the grass stank from its own rotting and
stuck to his cheeks, and he just kept going.
They say he climbed back out the other side
days later, holding a baby girl,
his tailored outfit good as new
and not a whiff of the swamp on him.
“A baby girl?”
        Maybe his wife, actually.
“Or his wife! Which is it?”
        Look, if I had all the details I wouldn’t be telling
        this story, would I?


IV. You Follow Me

                 if you saw him

The ocean’s pulse is endless here, Poseidon’s bitter wrath
relentless, thrashing at the stubborn sand—and I,
transfixed between—

                standing there, holding out his arms

Foolish daughter, who stole you from me?
Who gave you legs and set you on the land?

                standing there to welcome you to shore

You who were brought forth in iniquity,
your skin is new, soft, not meant
for stones and grass that cut like knives.
Now the saltwater at your ankles—ha!
I see it stings. I see you shrink from me.

                    you would wade
                    you would wade

You will not pass through unharmed. No daughter of mine

                    not only through a sea of wrongs,
                    but through hell itself

Who are you? I do not know you. No daughter of mine

                    if you saw him
                    you would wade

Out on Tiberias we threw our nets
    into dark waves, which crested with a whisper,
splashed cold starlight on our hands, and broke
    the image of the moon cast on the sea.

He just hasn’t made my bed yet,
she used to say, when the ground grew too hard
and she’d sit on a pillow to weed the garden,
when her skin had been folding up for years
and her world had long been slipping toward silence.
It wasn’t that she wanted to leave us,
but I think she was tired.
Did she picture sheets made of stars, smooth
and tucked in like clouds, maybe
smelling like spring blossoms, or like old pine?
Did she dream of quilts crafted by
his careful hand, filled to the binding
with a century’s worth of stories—did she want to see
his gentle smile as he drew the covers to her chin,
did she imagine clean summer wind
as she slipped away to rest at last?
She left so much behind, even my house bends
to gather the pieces. My mother tends
bereaved orchids at the window and keeps
one of her blankets on the living room couch, which
I’ve been hiding under and wondering
if we got it backwards all along: could it be
we were the ones who made the bed, smoothing
sheets and trembling at the emptiness beneath,
the best our human hands could do—
we braced ourselves for night, and
maybe we were wrong,
maybe he burst into the room and threw back the curtains,
maybe he pulled her up as sunlight streamed in
and he sang in his joy, I couldn’t wait
to wake you, there is so much for us to do today,
so many birds and trees and flowers to see,
mountains to scale with your new strong knees and
rivers to splash with your new young feet,
a whole city to show you and all your friends
looking for you, my darling,
my little girl, get up!

Your death crashes here
like an angry storm; we raise our windows
and let the sun weep through the cracks.

Despair seizes my brothers by the throat
and shakes the air out of their lungs, while
you, faceless, touch my cheek—odd thunder.

Your headstone wakes
astride a hollow grave,
where I dig on hands and knees until

we are three years old again. The rubble
breaks my skin with gracious teeth.
I learn to love you.

Your body slips into its place,
your shadow burning,
unexpected laughter like a song.

I woke up to the taste of coconut.
Is there anything worse
than happiness? When I was younger,
I only shook hands, a grace
I probably don't deserve. As long as we plod
eastward toward the ocean and
its tide pools, slippery kelp,
old mp3 players with Irish names,
the earth twirls, and sighs.
There’s nobody to hold anymore.
I dreamed you were in the forest,
two or three years ago, waiting to sprout
damp fungus between conversations,
and what is a mold but a tool
of self-discipline? And are we then shapes,
or echoes of shapes around us?
Yesterday I buckled down and made
up my mind. Sometimes you find yourself
on the street, not even glancing at your own
reflection as you go along.

my mother had the time to gasp
before the bowl scattered
and left its negative behind:
an old friend’s shadow, told
in the space between pieces.

The new gods still play old tricks,
but we have lost some of our wisdom.

I think maybe my ancestors knew:
gnarled carrots and lopsided smiles were just
the way of things, the warm and imperfect
voice of the earth. Nobody asked apple trees
to bear crystals, or women to bear marble—only

fools, open-mouthed, scrabbling at      

        Ellen really did it, can you believe?
        Traded her baby boy for one of the fae!
        Oh sure, he’s beautiful, but
        she hasn’t heard what happened to
        old Katherine’s second one, seventeen
        years past? Grew up a right horror, he did.

ghosts all dressed up
like the backs of their eyelids.

I think we used to know.

These days we have worn our pockets out
with asking, and our gods yield freely,

        There is a fragment of the sun
        caught in your hair, so that
        I want to weep . . .

delighted, while lethe slips under our tongues;

we reach for the same illusions now
and never stop to wonder. Our grandmothers
tried to warn us, and we laughed until

        All perfect
        All mine

we cried, jaws unhooked and gaping.
We fastened the chains with
our own hands.

I stopped

where
the dead bee
still crouched

at the puddle’s
edge

to drink

1. the journey

I met a man on the road to the city
who asked me if I believed in love.
We were walking over ashes
that smelled like human flesh, the dust of it
getting into our shoes, and
I didn’t know what he meant.

Maybe he was talking about the way
a kid’s face lights up to see her mom.
Maybe he was talking about laughter,
the easy silence between old friends,
the soft look some people slip into
when they don’t think anyone’s watching.

But he cried and covered his face with his hands,
and I think he meant forgiveness.


2. in the dark

Last night I fell asleep with sirens
under my bed and the sound of terror
cracking in the streets.
Somehow I kept breathing
until the ceiling turned from black to gray.

Who will be the next person
to tell us it’ll be all right, to hold out promises
like cabinet medicine for our cancer,
and how long will it be
before the bandages fall apart again?

And even then, who will we have to blame?


3. lazarus

         I must remember . . .
         somewhere, there is
         a king who keeps his word.


4. the sound of his voice

We came to the dock, where they were trawling
the riverbed for rubble but kept pulling bodies
out of the mud.

A woman from the boat
stood scrubbing the silt off her arms
and she couldn’t stop shaking,
couldn’t look at the day’s haul as the muddy tarps
got carried off.

I think she remembered each face too well.
Maybe she kept finding them everywhere:
fathers like ghosts in the kitchen,
phantom kids running around the backyard
and shadows of mothers stuck in traffic.
Maybe she was afraid if she opened her eyes,
she might see herself, washed too pale
and long past drowning.

The man spoke to her the way he spoke to me.

When we left, her eyes were still closed,
but her hands were clean.


5. “do you believe in love?”

At an old gravestone we stopped.
A whole family was buried there, so long ago
the stone was washed blank of memory,
a second burial,
an extra layer of death.

But when he squatted down and his fingers
touched the cold soil—as morning
crept across the frozen earth,

I saw their names,
bright and unexpected, kept
so carefully for all this time.

They were waiting
just behind his teeth.

When I was born, my parents etched their names
into the blade of a sword and
laid it in my hands.
I carry it like a loaded gun.

My belt sags heavier as I get older, a grievous inventory:

three coiled whips from my brothers, braided and knotted up
with bookmarks, backyard twigs, tape from unwound cassettes.

two finger knives carved from pine needles and
the old safety pins my sister and I used
to write our stories intertwined.

a paper-fledged arrow stained with salamander ink,
one garrote sliced from a single guitar string,
a hand-axe made of car door hinges
and rusted train tracks.

I wish I could say my fingers never
flew to my waist, itching to draw blood,
that each aging gift is not tinged with dark traces of regret.
I wish I could say my scars don’t wear the shapes
of everything I chose to give away.

As for the sword, I am glad of its weight. I am glad
that to step without it seems strange, incomplete.

Too many mothers I’ve seen reeling,
their children’s blades sunk to the hilt,

but they don’t cry for the pain of it, they don’t seem
to notice their own bodies torn nearly in two:
they knew all along what it meant to give a child a weapon.

I only see them dazed at the fingerprints left behind,
trying to comprehend the incomprehensible—
how bewildering, how unbearable,
that someone grown so much a part of you

might drive your love
back through your heart
and walk away.

        “If you run now, without a moment’s rest…” 
         – C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy