metonymy4u

           because

if i were another of your tears the ocean didn’t want
i’d give something unexpected to the world
             instead of a child,

my daughter thought the story funny when six
years old i told her while swinging in the chair
we strung for her the year of her birth.

she thought we’d made the whole thing up.

how we’d conceived the idea of her
while holidaying in stockholm, tried
all the way from hessen to the dolomites
to give desire expression. finding none

i planted a stone for your memory.
tilled the garden for other works,

i might leave in your stead.

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             emptiness

this is water when you wanted it,
adding nothing to the sum.

sure it’s the oath that we all took
to live aware for a while,

and let loose the bounds of thought—
language jail settlement storm.

the question is whether accumulation
were better left off,

while we go back
to buddha’s simple emptiness. that is

more rich than all possibility,
fertility and joy—

snow cascades.
what can one add to wholeness?

to completion or
eternity?

if you accept one more for yourself,
you lose yourself as sure as a fish

loses the race to hook line and grab,
as sure

as open-ness dies in the field
of knowing: it is the

only landing that ever launched a ship
the only bow that never went astray

the only eyes that ever saw,
tender hearts above the fray. with

computation and mis-engeneration
shall i enter the wisdom of speech,

learn
and foster a life?

return anything at all to the universe?
strike a journey

with only
the compassion in my heart?

let it go and go.
be in gone.

live in went.
sigh, in love.

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i was done with song
long before the angel closed her eyes
blessed my daughter’s brow,
and said grace one last time.
sure we could have played another hand
quietly bluffed our way
to the final exhalation of anxious time;
but then one might wonder
if the cliché of our lives would ever end,
if you would ever sin and carry
lovingly, a child of mine.

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if the body feels intolerable,
            sweep it away.

feel it fall off finally after all these years,
                        know
            shame and cessation
            rules and compliance
            larceny and forgiveness

for what they really are—

            black body radiation.
            the zero of zero.

            language it all over
            again

            and love me
forever

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foreign sounds
tailored fear
angle of dismay
turn key of magnetic
induction—
take me home
love me
like no one ever has

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                        a long stretch even
                                    for a psychiatrist

as i read back through some of my client’s old files
one day
just to catch up and
address some clinical issues,
hopefully, i
found myself wondering,

what did he look like then,

when he was
the 18 year old with a history of depression,
and who might have been abused
by some family member or other
when he was nine? in those days

was there light in his eyes,
home on his mind? despite
myself i couldn’t quite make it out—

what had changed?

i thought of a young,
wiry, grinning,
strangely
funny young man,
an overgrown boy really—

in his father’s best hat.

i tried to picture his favorite corner,
his own special pause and saunter,
the knots in his shoes or the way
he hung those long fingers
out of his pockets,
not resting,
but not doing anything either.

just awkward and time-spent.

the early signs of something that would one day
            bring him to me,
but that no one could name

yet.

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            The speaker, her brother

I watched her eyes filled with such love for him that
in that moment I knew only the death placed
upon my beginning: always longing
for such possibilities as I could never have.

Anger is when seeing is incomplete. Like a foot
in the night that we encounter and realize
too quickly only as our own. There

are times when you must strike out and return
to nothing. To an empty hut that your beloved
never knew, or left after a night
of sweetness.

When poise is just a dress of compromise
with dreams that never were, and

retires a compliment of hope that misses its own demise.

The heart is easily moved on its own.
And too much is left out, when we tell

our stories.

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i met a young man who already had tears in his eyes

i said, why grieve young man
            the saddest day already contains everything
            in its
                       sunrise.

he said, i did not know that when it happened
            time would spare me for a while
i said more’s the worse for you young man
            because you wore out your

                                   smile

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conceptually future promises
were what i had dinner with
not you that came later
you addicted me to your kisses
i’m trembling still looking
for a cure

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my bones will bleach the desert clean
                to wonder

why did god make

                       such a place of dumb
                       suffering

where babies are cold
                                  children unprotected
                       and love unanswered

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