XXVI

Perfect as lentils soaking, each round pebble
Bathed where the water laps, drifts against the current gently.

There juniper exudes a pungent meady scent, and the wood birds are wiser
Than their cultivated brothers. Warbler and thrush have darkly glinting eyes,
And are never startled.
They know these trees, this stream, like their own voices.

And in this heavy bearded wood there are more loamy secrets,
Where spiky pine blankets the condescending lumps of fallen trees.
There a blunderer may find himself in dreams of a peculiar kind,
When light and desire conspire to draw him deeper
Into the forest's pleroma,
And except he is a fool, he will not know it.

There moves the forest's guardian, all draped.
He is the earthy and the intoxicating spirit of this place.
In shape he frustrates any illustration, complete is he,
And any portrait makes his parts absurdity, for he is beauty.

Any eye that sees him finds its deepest fear and dearest joy,
The wanderer is rested in his soul, the hunter rankled,
The lover spoiled of any cheapening love.
Here, in this fecund stillness
Is the utter soul of worlds.

The Memory of Birds

I reached her house and saw her sitting cross-legged in the front yard, in the shade of the big maple tree. She was looking up the street, so our eyes met at the same time. She smiled, but she didn’t get up. I smiled too, not knowing what to say, and ambled across the lawn to her. There was something small and brown in her hands that quivered slightly.

I felt tall and awkward, walking up to Eliza sitting there in the grass. She didn’t say anything until I was right in front of her, and then she asked,

“Would you like to hold him?”

I grinned and said yes. She told me to sit down. Then she placed the brown fluffy thing in my hands. Geoffrey adjusted his stubby wings to regain his balance after the transfer. I wasn’t prepared to feel how light he was, how fragile, like a handful of grandfather dandelions. The queerest thing was the sensation of his body against my fingers; I could distinctly make out his breastbones beneath the down. That surprised me. There seemed to be nothing but airy fluff and a thin membrane of skin between my fingertips and his ribs. But below I felt his round belly, warm and moist. It swelled in and out. His little feet clutched at my skin in a funny way, so I laughed, and Eliza looked at me, enjoying my initiation. I felt like I should say something.

“How old is he?”

She answered that he was probably about two weeks old. She said she knew this because his eyes were fully open but he still had baby fluff.

I was always impressed by Eliza’s solemn knowledge. Maybe that was why she charmed me like no other girl I’d ever met. She was a child, but her mind was sensible and probing. I still don’t know what she saw in me; I was such an overgrown excuse for a teenager. Maybe she sensed how I saw meaning in things, the way she did.

I gazed back down at Geoffrey, who was blinking and rustling his little sheathed wings. I bent my head to inspect them. Each feather was growing out of a semi-transparent tube, made of quill material. The tips of his feathers were free and fanning out, but the roots were still tightly bound in tube-sheaths.

With my face close to Geoffrey like that, I smelled him for the first time. It was a curious, delicate smell: eggy, sweet, with a hint of urea. I didn’t find it offensive, and leant there, inhaling for a moment.

Then Eliza shifted beside me and I saw her pick up a recycled yogurt container from beside her leg. She pulled out a small worm, took it between her fingers, and methodically tore it into three bits. They wriggled and exuded guts, but she placidly laid two of the pieces on her bare knee, and leaned over to feed Geoffrey the third. I watched in silent admiration. As her hand neared Geoffrey, he lifted his head, beak open, and flapped his tiny wings, letting out a series of sharp, shrill chirps. I could feel his whole body straining up toward that bit of worm. With the writhing morsel safely in his beak, he bobbed his head and swallowed it, his eyes pressed shut.

“Don’t the parents sometimes regurgitate the food for their babies? I asked. “Would spitting on the pieces help Geoffrey digest them?” I hoped this was an intelligent question.

Eliza leaned back and squinted for a moment in thought. Then she turned to her knee and picked up a second bit of worm, saying,

“Bird saliva is different from human saliva.”

I nodded. And I watched Eliza carefully feed Geoffrey the rest of the worm. His body was warm, and my palm sweated, so his down feathers stuck to my skin. When I gave him back to Eliza my hand felt cool in the air. Eliza took him in a motherly sort of way, and I felt something like a father. Protective, and proud, and a little in awe.

As I walked home I brushed my nose, and smelled Geoffrey on my hand. 

Wild

Stripe me like a Bengal tiger,
Spread your wet paint brush across my shoulders, down my back.
Stroke your lines in daring arcs, and smack
Your hands in two palm prints against my cheeks.
Release
Your feathered thoughts in plumes of blue,
Beak your way to preen in grease,
Sheathe my arms in papered tubes,
And grow me wings where once my fingers grew.

Wild II

Stripe me like a Bengal tiger,

Spread your wet paintbrush across my shoulders, down my back.

Stroke your lines in daring arcs, and

Smack your hands in two palm prints against my cheeks.

Release

Your feathered thoughts in plumes of blue.

Beak your way to preen in grease,

Sheathe my arms in papered tubes, and

Grow me wings where once my fingers grew.

Boerne, August 9

I came back inside to a shriveling marmalade scorpion in the bedroom, tangled in hair and dust. He was dead until I touched him, and then he died under a shard of carved flint.

Imitation is a form of flattery. If you will make this your life, you may have a master for your advocate. If I’m not painting, I feel less alive.

I can’t leave you tied to the chair without coming and speaking and stroking your knee. But I can’t take you with me. I need to puncture my soul and draw out cords to air out in this room, to hang from kitchen cabinet doors and drape over high-backed chairs. I don’t know what all, yet: I will not know until it is finished. And I cannot carry you as I do it. And I cannot carry you as I do, and live. But in leaving you I feel ashamed to worship. Which way is slavery? Which way is beauty?

Love hits you harder when you run toward it.

The Alamo, San Antonio, August 9

I like talking to hotel room cleaners. Especially this kind: friendly, helpful, and humorous. It’s like instant accommodation when you wheel about a sweet lady in a chair. You can squat your car anywhere, use “out of order” bathrooms, kneel in parking lots to administer cold blended soup. People open doors, give up seats, smile. Or look surprised.

But I leave her for a while with her husband and walk off alone down the block, past Bonham Street to the spreading trees and clustered people around the church-turned-fort-turned-shrine. Lookers shuffle around glass-covered knives and a coonskin hat. Leathery men sweat on the scaffolding, repairing dusty, bone-colored walls.

Strangers walk the pavement where a battle took place. On the concrete path a skittering catches my eye, and I turn in time to see a green anole, subdued to brown, crossing to a bench’s shadow. Recognition cheers me in this strange and sweltering place. A friend from my old home. I can almost feel his white puffy mouth, fine rows of teeth, on my finger. A drop of blood. Like my grandmother’s cat, anoles drew me inexorably, and left scars.

A century old live oak bends and sags and beckons. One bold youth in red clings on a branch. I am not impressed.

And for all that, John had no last name. A freedman, remembered, but stamped in history with little but the color of his skin.

We drove home and he used my father’s word to describe the way I did my father’s work. An excellent job as navigator.

A Plentid Day

A wren, under a Maxfield Parrish midnight sky,

Breathed on beatifically by the wild sea breeze,

And bathed in the glow of a half-bright, bridal moon,

Very silent, very shy.

Brown birds wear a bold face, smoke gold pipes, dwell in cedar houses.

Imagined inadequacy bleeds into reality.

Autumn and the call of wild geese are far ahead, and may not come with September. 

I have never loved summer until today.

Did I forget to follow the lavender, the rose, the two-day’s four-hundred-sixty-seven stella doras in their full-out happy, happy, love of being alive? Did I lose delight in blue? I want the eighteen sailboats in one patch of cove, the litter of visitors on the rocks, to mean as much to me as stillness and the cleanliness of all that is not human. 

You win me over, you love that I thought I had understood, that I wanted to deserve, that I feared that I could lose by being honest.

An irritatingly bad haircut. Reminds me of my pride, and so I am able to listen. I may be comfortable cold, but I decide.

Charles Wesley, Charles Wallace, the 9^th of 150 copies, thimbled cheeks, a honeyed right ear healing.

Paint, each stroke and line the longing of an unmet desire, a waiting, a patience, a pulling out of stiffened wooden drawers, and so blank paper.

But I have sweat and warm breath that fogs up the window.

I'll let violin complaints explain my spirit to a listening heaven. I still want to dance on the floor. 

The astounding turnip is imprinted with my fingertips.

I'll sweep under the table in the morning.

Ant Lions

Under the green light of the branches, where You birthed me,

Under the streaked sky’s flying engines, wings, and whines,

By the gravel’s grating crunch like ice cubes, cold and dry-

Here the sweat of my upper lip is like relief,

Like exhaust from a burning, bleeding heart that sparks

With friction, “It’s fractious”, foolish:

Pulling two ways and never brave enough

To let one side win.

Cicadas grin and cackle wickedly.

But it’s only my interpretation, because they riddle me with bullets so my irritation

Will lure out the devil, like the spittle on the pine needle aggravates the ant lion

From his hollow in the sand.

Home Poems: for the Northernists and my Father

All the Moths in My Hair Will Swarm to This Light

The broken branches of the mulberry tree still cling on their living brothers.

They will not fall until a strong wind comes;

My father will not pull them down.

Small trees I once could not climb have surpassed me.
“Son, you can carry me now.”

The tadpole is dried up with the puddle.

The sage blooms, the sage flowers in purple. The ferns converge around the rocks and northern wall. Woolly mint swallows up the strawberry bed. And I am content to watch.

Hurry home, heart. Gather up your frayed ends. Leave behind the noise of yesterday; consume the sunlight before it fades.
Who is to say this will be here tomorrow?

So close now, like your brother knocking on the wall between your rooms,

Like your Mother’s photographs looking like you, suddenly,

Like cut grass clinging to the tops of your feet.

The grass is strewn with fur.

Stop this harried grasping after life and observe:

What went before you, and what will happen after.

You are a small pear blossom. Flower now, and shrivel bravely.

Do not call fruit a burden, though it bears you down.

Carry on a conversation with the sparrow, the thrasher, the cormorant, the wren. Let the slow wisdom of the grebe seep in. Support the hearty robin, respect the hardened city pigeon.

You are not nidifugous; stay at home while there is a home to have.
And make it glad.

You returned too late for the may-apple, the child of the mandrake, the sole fruit of its two umbrella-arms.

Now wait another year. Years see changes you would not expect. Cast your crumbs upon the waters, for in many days you will find full bellies in your wake.

Loved, loved, loved, comes with every wind.

Do not forget it.

The tadpole is dried up with the puddle.

The grass is strewn with fur.

And there are thorns in the honeysuckle.

But the grass, trees, and sky combine in fireflies

And the porch light signals me to come inside.

Another Old Cliché

One thing that grows harder with time

Is believing.

Seeing only the day-to-day leaves a tannic aftertaste.

Then sorry thoughts bend their lips to my ears, asking me why am I so old?

Better save the bitter for the winter, when all the world embraces aged thoughts.

It seems somehow wrong to be weary in spring.

Leads to another life are hinting at me from the trees, the gasping fish, the headless snake.

One thing never leaves:

The empty space.

Spring leaves stick closer together

In numbers.

Safety is found in knowing you are free falling

And stretching out your arms to the air.

The Memory of Birds (Older Version)

I neared her house and saw her squatting in the front yard, in the shade of the big maple tree. There was something in her hands that quivered slightly. She was looking up the street, so she saw me at the same time I saw her. She smiled, but she didn’t get up. I smiled too, not knowing what to say, and crossed the lawn to her.

            I felt tall and awkward, walking up to Eliza sitting there in the grass. She didn’t say anything until I was right in front of her, and then she asked,

“Would you like to hold him?”

I grinned and said yes. She told me to sit down. Then she placed the warm, fluffy thing in my hands. Geoffrey adjusted his stubby wings to regain his balance after the transition. I wasn’t prepared to feel how light he was, and how small. Like a handful of seedpod dandelions. The queerest thing was the sensation of his body against my fingers; I could distinctly feel his breastbones beneath the down. That surprised me: there seemed to be nothing but airy fluff and a thin membrane of skin between my fingertips and his bones. But nearer to his feet I felt no bones, only his belly, warm and moist. It swelled in and out. His little feet clutched at my skin in a funny way. I laughed, and Eliza looked at me, enjoying my initiation. I felt like I should say something so I asked,

“How old is he?”

She answered that he was probably about two weeks old, but she wasn’t sure because she’d only had him since Friday. She said she knew this because his eyes were well open but he still had baby fluff.

I was always impressed by Eliza’s solemn knowledge. Maybe that was why I loved her so. She was a child, but her mind was sensible and probing. I still don’t know what she saw in me; I was such an overgrown excuse for a teenager. Maybe she sensed how I appreciated the meaning in things, the way she did.

I gazed back down at Geoffrey, who was blinking and rustling his little sheathed wings. I bent my head to inspect them. Each feather on his wings was growing out of a semi-transparent tube, made of quill material. The tips of his feathers were already free and fanning out, but the roots were still tightly bound up in their tube-sheaths.

            With my face close to Geoffrey like that, I smelled him for the first time. It was a curious delicate smell: eggy, a bit like mild urine, and sweet. I didn’t find it offensive, and leaned there, inhaling for a moment. Then Eliza moved beside me and I saw her pick up a recycled yogurt container from beside her left leg. She reached into it and pulled out a small worm. She took it with both hands and methodically tore it into three bits. They wriggled and exuded guts, but she placidly lay two of the pieces on her bare knee, and leaned over to feed Geoffrey the third. I watched her in silent admiration. I had never known a little girl to be so unconcerned with such things, and I wanted to say so. But I didn’t. As her hand neared Geoffrey, he lifted his head with open beak, and flapped his tiny wings and chirped. I could feel his whole body straining up toward that bit of worm.

“Don’t parent birds sometimes eat and regurgitate the food for their babies? I asked. “What if you spit on the pieces to help Geoffrey digest them?” I was hoping this was an educated question.

Eliza leaned back and squinted for a moment while her mind worked. Then she turned back to her knee and picked up another bit of worm, saying,

“Bird spit is different from human spit.”

I nodded. And I watched Eliza carefully feed Geoffrey the last two pieces. He was warm, and my palm sweated, so his down stuck to my skin. When I gave him back to Eliza my hands felt refreshed by the air. Eliza took him in a motherly sort of way, and I felt something like a father. Protective, and proud, and a little in wonder.

As I walked home I wiped my nose, and smelled Geoffrey on my hand.