The Karuna Journals

This will be my last post to The Karuna Journals for a while. Possibly a long while . I’m moving to a new blog home, at least as long as they’ll have me: http://blog.beliefnet.com//beginnersheart/.

The new blog will be, in many ways, like this one: poetry, thinking about how we can be kinder to each other, talking about tea and teaching and the world window. It’s called ‘Beginner’s Heart,’ a play on Shunryu Suzuki‘s ‘Beginner’s Mind.’ The artwork to the side is the metta symbol — the sign for lovingkindness.

I’m grateful to each of you who has read my work, joined me in trying to figure life out, sat down at this virtual tea table and visited. I hope you’ll make the move with me to Beginner’s Heart.

i.
four crows bead the lip of an overpass
their heads swivel
one-two-three-four
like a four-gun salute.
a choreography of crows.
four miles later ​
six, maybe seven crows
lift like leaves ​ spiral homeward
to the branch, the wet black leaves
of oklahoma winter.
 

ii.
stones are birds manqué
lost and wingless
beneath dark earth
in april​​ that haunted month
their round backs scrabble
towards the sky
and dream of wings.
 
iii.
beneath the concrete bridge
a row of gourd-shaped nests
60 maybe 80 pebbled
bottles holding blind futures
coiled within mud walls
another string of beads
that dream of flight

12:30, and they file in from the hall
circle the chairs against the wild animals
of memory
begin to write

It’s Tuesday, or Thursday
and I tell them I love you.
I hang it from their slender necks
like a talisman
pin it to their Tshirts like a note
a map, a sacred name
magic to keep them safe.

We write:
I love you
I whisper in my red Moleskine
to Anna w/ her laddered arms
each parallel scar a name
her father beat her with
to Tiffany — eyes larger than
her anorexic waist
to Charles — who lives within
the pages of a novel set
somewhere (anywhere) other.

Outside, sirens rise and fall
a doppler of destruction
while I chant my incantation:
I love you ~ keep safe ~
I love you ~ live long
prosper

Incubus

He steps from the fog of dreams, shakes his hair like a wet animal,

turns to her as she steps free from nightmare. His lover has told her

stories of his mouth, so that in this dream she traces it with her fingers,

lays the width of a thumb in the hollow above his lip. Slower

than the growth of trust, than the first time she ran to meet him (this too

a dream), he wraps himself around her, holds her beating heart

within the wide plane of his chest. The two of them caught for the space

of a night in the darkness that always separates like things.

And even though she recognises the landscape of this dream – her husband’s

moon, his wife’s horizon – she is safe for this moment. Here, she pulls

his head down to her own, and traces with her tongue the ellipsis

of his throat. Light’s language of shadows is blue beneath his eyes, where

she watches his pupils widen, darken. In the room where he lays sleeping,

his wife will wonder at the quick movement of his closed eyes.

Elegy for my father on his birthday ~

Perhaps I am like you, after all

Perhaps this river of words

that sometimes in the spring

becomes a white torrent

is what you could not say

thought and pain and want

dammed behind your stammer

and the keen steel of your grey eyes.

When the moon fills my throat

and the blue-white light

of its fire struggles

to form itself into words

am I like you, Daddy?

Am I words you never found?

Am I readings of a cadenced march

of poetry? Kipling, Shakespeare, Keats?

When the bright belief dulls

beneath dark history

are the words I hone against this bitter craft

my inheritance?

Perhaps, if I am like you

not the alien my mother named me

the bee queen

perhaps if I am fighting, as you did,

war after war

wielding anaphora like your machete

taking refuge in the foxhole of desire

perhaps I can thank you.

(This is the after, for my student ~)

Condillac love

Something innate, something spiralled in the coil

of our human hearts, like the language Condillac

imagined waiting, patient for its trigger.

This is how I recognised you that tentative night

30 years ago. Deep within my cells, deeper

than genetic memory, vibrating in the music

of blood pushing through the thin membranes

that separate us, here is where I knew you.

So well that now,

as our sons step over thresholds we

once crossed, I startle in déjà vu:

possibility is a liminal

threshold. They will cross over,

hear music and begin.

This is an older poem I reworked. One of my students is dealing w/ an alcoholic parent. I wanted to share how bad it can be, and also that it can get better…

Secular salvation

We have this tendency, poets, to find within each shell

a metaphor. Tracing the spiral of nautilus chambers,

we see our own cloistered lives. So that life confronts us

in unlikely places – the striations of colour that hold together

the layers of the prairie sky, the web of lines that has become

the mirror’s response to “Who am I?” Each of these gives back

the beads that scatter on the floor, the victims of haste,

the vivid anger that fills this room. So familiar with words

that I taste them in my dreams, I face you, mute.

There are no words to salvage from this shipwreck.

And even now I try to find an image, some metaphor

to clutch. One thread leading from the labyrinth.

With the right words, spoken like an incantation,

maybe I can bring you back alive.

Once we believed that drunkeness was divine,

dreams and words and gifts beyond our pale human lives.

Those damned gods, always fucking with us. Me trying

to ride my way to heaven on the comet tail of the right words

in the right order, you trying to escape from hell on fumes.

Sifting through the lives of others, I keep clinging to the threads

that still connect us, watching ropes unravel, seeing you trapped

within the coma of your habits. While I follow pictures in my head,

trying to create meaning. Trying to weave threads together.

On the anniversary of the OKC bombing ~

Today is the day the city burned.

Thick smoke roiling from the split heart

Of a building where Baylee, Tevin,

Chase & Colton and the sergeant

And the captain and the mother

And the father and the grandmother

And the aunts and uncles and all our

Split hearts broken open

Burned.

Sixteen years, and the wound

Has not closed. Has left no tidy scar.

Only chairs where ghosts perch ~

Empty. Highbacked. Neatly ordered

As if death that crashed in violent

Waves, and left in its wake

Apocalypse

Could somehow be controlled.

Made sensible.

Even today, 9:03 clicks

Into focus like the snick of trigger

And I remember:

How the two Indonesian women

In my class trembled in the bar ditch

Where someone almost ran

Them over. How my Pakistani

General’s son was saved from death

By his own hand, held in front

Of his face as strangers fired

From a speeding car.

What is it about death that foments

Disbelief? As if no one who looks

Familiar could hold the scythe?

As if only the Other can hold

Hatred like a black flower

In a dead heart?

The empty chairs are quiet.

Smoke and ash settled years

Ago. But the fire still burns.