"hyacinth" and other poems

hyacinth

these are the words for when
i've lost my way

this is my house on
the morning of the first frost

the purple sky and
my children asleep and the
cross hanging crooked
on the wall

the hands of angels bound
with barbed wire

their throats torn out and
this is the sound
the blind girl makes at
at the exact moment her
body is found

this is silence wrapped in
black folds of pain

the ocean cold and
too far away to matter

the belly of god filled with
the bones of the raped

love
which is nothing without
the darker weight of fear

---

voice

a child's body floating to the surface of
the pacific somewhere off the coast
of southern california

this
and nothing else

or no

this and then
another body and then another

a plastic cup

a seat cushion

and you come up behind me
and read these words over my shoulder
and walk away again
without a sound

we fill the house with cold silence
or we yell at the children

i leave the poem unfinished

sit on the couch with
my eyes closed and the tv on

think about the man who wrote
these are too personal
or about the approaching winter

the doors hung crooked
and the frost that will form
inside the windows and the wind
that blows through them

and i think about
what i can hate and what i
can change and
you cry in the bedroom

you fall asleep or
you stare at the ceiling

we hold our breath and listen

---

gaza

these are only walls
she says
and this is only god

and i have hands of course
and the crows have teeth
and no one wants to believe in
the death of the sun

no one wants to
accept responsibility for
st. peter

and what about the children
i've never met?

what about my own?

all of the people i'll
never be able to protect

the days i've taken for granted

cold white light through the
windows of rented rooms and
the lies i've told in them to
keep myself safe

the age of bombs
which will outlast us all

the innocent destroyed
by the guilty

everything made personal
when it's pressed this hard
against my throat

---

a lesser equation

and do you
remember america?

an animal with the
body of a crippled man
and the head of a dying bull

a child kept in a cage

a girl tied to a bed

her lover maybe
and however much he
charged his friends
to fuck her

however many years
she let him

and i have no use for
stories with morals and i
don't believe that the meek
will inherit anything

i wish nothing but misery
on the men who would
have me die for
their causes

it's as close as i'll come
to religion

---

stay inside

your hands and your mouth
which i mistake for god
or the dying man
who says he's not afraid

his wife
who says she is

stands in a room
thick with dust and the smell of shit
and considers how effortlessly
this moment has been arrived at

the youngest child stillborn
and the oldest daughter disappeared
and the last thing she said
which was i hate you

the emptiest part of the afternoon
which is always where i am

every sound wrapped in silence
and every front door locked
and all of our houses lost in this
wilderness that has grown up
around us

all of the roads that take us
to the hill of fifteen crosses

the names fading
and the faces forgotten
and the way the dying man laughs
when he talks about it

the way he describes the future
as a windowless room

says all you can do is
talk to yourself and wait for
the lights to go out