Several poems for November (with a reading of Two Faces)

Ars Poetica

A poem is one side of a conversation,
one that started with shoes, but now it’s about
the Buddha’s flower sermon. The way
you came is dark and overgrown,
but your feet feel like Lazarus tasting
his first supper after that death ended.

It’s the same conversation to read as to write.
The poet only has more decisions to make.

If you’re both up to it, you stop talking
in those places made for silence.
You leave each other no wiser.
You forget what you talked about
and you walk home, stepping on the soles
of your shoes, walking the shoe sermon.

**********

Anger

All of the old angels had a job to do.
They came when needed and left.
Gabriel spoke, Michael fought.
I don’t know the name of anger,
but I believe that anger is an angel.
His job is to look and make
you look back. He comes like a cat
from around the back of the house
and looks at you with those eyes.

Anger is an angel of truth, an angel
of love and purpose. You look back
for the righteous joy of looking
at the truth, at the love, and the purpose.
You look until your own eyes shine,
with the iron light of the angel’s eyes.

When Anger closes his eyes
late at night, late in the year,
years later, there’s the world,
like a book whose acid is eating
it own pages. The angel has gone,
so you find your own reflection and look
hard something like the truth,
or love, or purpose, or just
the anger to light the world up again.

**********

The People We’ve Never Touched Are Under Water

But once we begin to touch them
pieces emerge
like fossils, one bone at a time.

Our pools turn grassy with protruding shaken hands,
and grow
lily pads of slapped backs.

Everything shifts under the skin of the pool,
refracted,
vanishing under webs of light.

Sometimes a hand reaches out from the water
and rests
a glistening print on your cheek.

We walk with our wet faces to the wind.
Cool gusts
put the hand back. Again. Again.

Sometimes we draw someone out with our bodies.
We begin–
hair with our hands, lips with lips.

**********

Two Faces
after a photograph of a man cleaning a statue of Christ in Bilbao, Ecuador.

The young man’s eyes are crescent with patience,
as if he's washing his baby brother, a family chore.
He twists a gray rag into the Christ’s eye,
removing the motes of ash from the face,
painted white so the wounds show up well.
He cleans the same Christ whose feet
were washed with the woman’s own hair.

Tungurahua volcano will erupt soon.
Tungurahua darkens the land with a plague of ash.

The statue’s eyes are round with thorny lashes.
They stare far off, fixed on a distant fear. This
is the Christ who felt his Father forsake him.
He’s unaware of being cleaned, unaware
of the damp rag and the hand. He’s aware only
of the fiery eye of God and of his own chosen flesh.

**********

Boredom

This is a day of ancient significance.
The mail doesn’t come, you’re boring
your family, and the tea tastes like paper.

Maybe you’ve slept too much. Your dreams
sank to the bottom and you woke up empty-
handed with no hunger for your breakfast.

Your nerves are buried deep and waiting.
You’re the exoskeleton letting go. Your soul
waits like a cicadae to break loose from you.