EMPTINESS SPEAKS
Everyone knows on any given day that compared
with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
- William James
The space between my sister's miscarriage
and her separate life is staring up at
us, speaking to us from a child's eyes that
don't quite focus, where the angle and shape
of the world is diffused into soft colors.
The space between my brother's shallow status
and his separate life is staring beyond us,
speaking to the "us" that isn't us, where
the shape of identity is away in a dream
of impossible colors. And the space
between my father's cancer and his separate
life is staring deep inside us, speaking
to a shape we can't quite see: buried scars braced
in silhouette, waiting to be filled with color.
EMBRACING THE UNSPEAKABLE
my mother sits holding an infant while
its mother leaves the room. (It suffers a disease
with an unspeakable name.) And I read
her eyes as an opiate of exile
into images that she has saved: her
untombed impregnations that have slept through dark
rains and painted childlike charcoal whispers
along the cave walls of her fire-lit heart.
But later when we're faced with the emptiness
of the road ahead of us, I recognize a trailing-off
in her answers, and the tragedy of the child
still settling itself into my mother's dress
of last rituals, where they both have stepped across
into the greener fields waiting for their arrival.
HALF-LIFE
You recognized it as a disturbance
after you walked away from death and dreamed
your humanity flying in an arrow-like stream
of something wild, flapping its rhythm of chance,
after chance, after chance. Or maybe it
was the question of color when you stepped
off the bus and recognized the dull breath
of middle-gray obliterating the myth
of truth, the myth of purpose with its tin
cup asking for money. Or maybe it
was the "thumping" that remained after you
escaped to an unintruded place, turned-in
to what you believed impossible, then slipped
back into the moon's light, its face split half in two.
AFTER FORGIVENESS
You could say that it was the trembling light
of the "other" behind the most common
of common landscapes that rescued my half-life
from my year without you. It was the sum
of all hours ribboned across its own depth,
evacuating the time of every hued
dying echo (and yet still sketched
in evergreen, granite, and blue spruce).
It was at least the guaranteed non-
absence of that, the respiration
of day and night in clarity and cloud,
or the rotting floor and its microscopic
life, or the spectrum of melting winds, or last
sighs from the uncollected scattered about.
