Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World
If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.
Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.
Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.
Treat it as you yourself
would be treated, brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.
And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant----
stroke the white throat,
the heavy trembling dewlaps
you'd come to believe were yours,
and plunge in the knife.
Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling,
that you came to love it, that was the gift.
Let the envious gods take back what they can.
Tags: passion poetry loss mindfulness
I’d reconstruct Heaven, or usurp Hell—
write till I swing open like a door hinge.
I arrive—a rogue who’d refurbish town.
I take my pen, begin to nail things down.
The judge sentenced us to life—
real, awake life
out of the jails we had been roaming in—
life in prism—
then started handing out fines
for parking too long.
These words are my mother’s,
my father’s, my brother’s, my lender’s, my garbage
man’s—the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere.
Above us all rose my mother’s hand, dangling from the column shifter
like some battle-tattered flag for independence, surrounded
by the glass shards and quietude of a parking lot gone empty.
My beautiful mother, safer than ever before,
even in defection. ¼ tank of gas, fully empowered,
her car pointed in every direction.
I wanted to shove her
away, thinking of my job, of headlines,
of how this kind of comfort was outside
the behavioral guidelines of my contract.
She began to sob more softly while holding me
tightly, and I let her. I let her have control
of me for that moment. I let her break
behavioral guidelines as more important ones
had been broken on her. And then we stopped
being student and teacher—just a couple people
at a loss when the powerful and unexpected
had been suddenly thrust upon us.
The principal and three students turned the corner
and stopped short. I knew it might be years
before I cleared my name, but far longer
for her to reclaim her life.
As children we learned our shadow
is a darkness we never totally shake
until we lie down, pull the shades,
draw the curtains, shut out the world,
and turn our own light out.
As hard as the diamonds in your smile,
the wind carries its hammers with no hands
and sustains a moan with no mouth,
seems to cradle solitude in its rough arms like firewood
to be burned in my house as it passes through
and asks, “Where does she sparkle from?
Will there be no more irises
in your garden tomorrow morning,
or perhaps any rainbows that covet
your roof will melt into Rorschach pastels
in your gutters and birdsongs in your windows
turn into shrill shriekings as you recall
how, for one moment, you were as brave
and equal to beauty as that which you feel?
Can’t a world end gloriously?
Shakespeare’s felicity is so often taught
it is easy to overlook how taut
the sinews in his neck must
have been when he grasped his pen, or the musk
that exuded from the fat of his chin
below a somewhat chthonic grin—
life wrestled death on his desk when he composed.
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