In the Memory Weeds

Our waging, wallowing in a feeling
of endlessness, all our tomorrows lined up

like Post-It notes, abundant with possibilities.
We walk in the hills to get closer to the sun,

to feel the warmth and then the burn.
We walk under a chaos of caw and caw:

We confuse. We collide. Cantankerous enters us.
When is a bird not a prop?

We stand in mud, miracle
enough among a cacophony of crows,

urge like electricity running through them,
as if they were calling for a missing

mother, a nest and a hole in the air
where the first wind licked new feathers.

Black wings hurling into green light,
wavering in the memory weeds—

We remember. We mind them. We mine them.

And the Place Was Water

at the Brooklyn Museum

No one is dying—leaving
a pool of blood for her sisters
to mop up—then not dying,
giving birth to me. No crumbs,
no stains. Only robin-egg blue
walls of this speculative period
room with its spindle leg chairs,
scenes from old Amsterdam, nothing
of the Canarsie mud left behind.
Each room empty except for all
the things, immaculate in permanent
dusk of museum light.

If you go, you must try to see all
that’s missing, visitor, some old
Da Da Conk drunk in the basement,
granddaughters watching him
beaten by their uncles—going on—
decades spent circling
the open grave of a feeling.

You must shuffle into dark
and darker rooms—Book
of the Dead, yellow papyrus
in white light, columns
of scratchings—bird, raining
cloud, eye, oval, parallel lines,
squiggly lines next to horizontal
translations spelling out the spell.

You are a swallow, a scorpion…
the flame that comes forth…

You are the fishes of hours.

Above a mantle: painted plastic
scrimshaw bottles, CEOs like stern sea
captains in black ink, and a mosaic—
trash and shells arranged into a sailor’s valentine
for the dear beloved who could be you,
please tell me it’s you and anyone.

If each tree is introspection,
an elegant gift, then so must be
telephone poles, birds on wires,
streets and culverts draining into the bay,
the shoreline littered
with gifts no one asked for—
tampon applicators
lighters
vape pens
syringes
straws
bottle caps
flip flop (unpaired)
a legless lawn flamingo

How many mouths chew and grind
in the ebb tide? How hungry is water?

To be snow or not—
that is one question dissolving
into others—marine snow—ceaseless
flurry of death and waste—
my dead and yours become
microbial hitchhikers
in microplastics, flocculent
flakes in sticky gel,
yo-yoing purgatory—
surface—seafloor—surface
over and over and over…

And that song of yesteryear
the father sang, the car sailing
over hills, his eyes piercing
distances—time before I was born—
his green song into the green valley wild.
Some hurt, regret still hangs
in the humidity of a summer’s day.

It’s best to view Edward Hick’s “Peaceable Kingdom”
at the end of your tour, not the beginning,
as I did, and walk the streets of Canarsie
for many hours trying to find any sign
of the people that gave the place its name.
In the famous painting, you will see
“The calf and the young lion and the fattling together”—
wary in their new world, looking out
at you while the humans conduct their business.

Summers, the sisters could look out
and see nothing but mud and grass and water—
they could turn their backs to the city,
see a world before roads, trains, buildings.
A world without them.

A view from a window, leaves
silvering in wind, passing cars,
voices trailing down the sidewalk,
untangling from language,
pure rhythm and pitch of the human
punctuated by bird calls.

Circle Time

In the bottom left corner, monks grain
by grain eating their way out of a monastery.
To the right, wolves matter-of-factly gnawing
a farmer in a book of Breughel paintings

I am grazing in. No sign of wind
in his mountains but blowing through me now
something-not-wind moves
the hair on my arms. Outside, a claw

seizes a plastic body, dumps lifeless
contents into the mouth of the milk-white
truck with green stripes and black letters,
as if it rubbed against a stubble field.

In a wind like this one, nothing stays still:
Crows a-jumble in a gust, messy
black flying of working something out.
Kids at recess—the Washington Wolves—

begin each day with a howl, becoming wolves,
tracks in snow wandering off at recess. Trees wind-
shape, black wings open and close, words
in circle time thrash around the room.

Water Wise

To feel what it is to be water
leaking from its source,
water that is a man draining

from a pool of memory, spring
in the hills, rain descending
into culverts and out again,
into day-shine, what should be
open. Free.

To have rushed, bubbled up, clear
and catching flecks of sunlight,
guiltless as a boy

separated from a lake like a mother
taken by sun, into sky.
To have been
runoff, siltation, solution of
nitrogen, phosphorous, pesticides

slipping under a warm green blanket,
lights going out in algal bloom,
muddy child in an oil plume.

To have forgotten the sweetwater
that held you weightless,
let gravity take you, let you
become other, orphan
clinging to things of the world.

Wildfire

Who set the fires, who sparked,
who left a trail of accelerants?

Grass blames itself, its dry wish
for immolation. Trees blame beetles,
beetles blame each other for their appetites.

I blame the whine of a neighbor’s saw
downing trees, creating defensible space.

The pounding bass of a passing car
blaring fuck the police! And—oh, lord, I think—I, too,
am fucked and do not know how to steer this body.

Neighbors collude with fire, they disappear
into rooms, sleep and smolder, rubbing two

invisibles. And yesterday’s Ecstacy
of St. Francis in the museum—we called him
Hipster Francis with his two-pronged beard—

something between agony and awe in his eyes,
something singeing every cell. I blame them all.

But most of all, it’s the incombustible in us—heat
without the ability to burn—the way you fall
asleep with a book over your chest.

A forest of pages burning, smoke rising into a blank sky.
The bed cannot hold us.