The sudden overcast quiet of the past tense
-Larry Levis
came, still in her cremation box, when we threw her
out into that equal
grayscale shade like an unanswered question.
With all incoming music
of nothing motionless, brother and I, in black armored wetsuits
drifted chest-high against
the undulating surface of winter’s seamless ocean and between
the cacophony-mix
of tidepool & wave,
with all slow elegy motion of sargassum seaweed’s wet
horsehair around us,
under one
raincloud’s citadel-sloping wall, its water pins, arrows…
we saw tiny fluorescent-lit green creatures dimple themselves
up from the November mirk as if keeping time.
Just as dusk swallowed
its landscape whole, our mother’s wood urn returned
under cradled cover of darkness without us–– if this is a story
about an ending,
there are at least two destinations for every death
I know.
Childhood passed away…
–Jorge Luis Borges
How could I have known that childhood
would stop-gap the Portuguese peninsula’s once whaling
station, where seawater became feather-weightless
as longing? Where sky’s white mourning fog came down-
drifting over the shoreline to ghost above one dead
whale, beached & flightless. Or that, emerging from
the cliffs’ brittle sagebrush & cactus, I saw them,
four nuns in black habit, their winged arms
outspread upon the oiled black wall of him,
as if to find the final bellow of his voice. Above
the full landscape of his heaved carcass, I believed
all incoming hours paused, because in that silent interval
between voice & consequence, I felt only
his crushed weight inside my body & the sinking
brine-soaked underearth beneath us.
When scientists came to cut sample pieces of the whale,
gulls lifted their quilled feet & beaks stole away
some of those open-window wounds. How
their alarmed birdcalls circled over his hard, barnacled body
that remained there for days till we were
no longer an audience. How could I have known
at nine, what this was, the unforeseen breach to feel
remorse as a cathedral sound of waves entered my bedroom:
sleeper waves, gravity breakers & their boundary
wave-phase speed recovered inside my breathing––
all flesh of fish song sent burial-back to sea
without an answer––what causes us to live
in any aftermath, I cannot say.
What happens if you jump inside a moving train?
It’s the day your cousin throws a dart into your brother’s chest,
then rolls you inside a rug & off the bed to be left.
No family ties to untie your tongue. Cruelty & kindness breathe
the same air & the speed of the green train
remains in the same frame as your body’s inertia. It’s a standoff.
A penny down. Your eye on the windows
as they swap one landscape for another. What happens to the man
in the copper-colored suit on a bicycle as
he hurdles into cross traffic, its duplicate force––until the brain’s
switching-yard strewn onto the hood of a car
shines for you to see as your parents drive past on the way to school.
Why you land in the same place and do not die.
