March 21, 2013

Sunday

by Maxine Clair

there were times she would play the piano
she would throw back her head and her wavy black hair would
                                                  dangle
she would strike the chords and move on the piano stool
                                                   and sing
Lord Jesus can I have a talk with you
Lord Jesus won't be long till I'll be through
and tears would be streaming down puffy rust cheeks
if there is no God there ought to be
the way she played and cried

March 11, 2013

To My children, Fearing for Them

by Wendell Berry

Terrors are to come. The Earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning toward me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.

March 04, 2013

Settling

by me

(This is a restructured and renamed version of Dust.)  

           Grief gongs like the alarm clock going off the morning after her death. Presses its hand against your stomach when you realize you have woken up. It was not a dream. Tastes like morning mouth and whiskey, slick grit across your teeth. Settles its residue in your room, like musk, like dust: 90% comprised of dead skin.
           Some mornings you marvel at your own fat fingers, their spring and coil, the blue curving veins. Some days your body starts running for no reason other than motion, shifting muscle a joy newly discovered, and some evenings it forgets to be warm-blooded, curling inward, inward, like paper set to flames.
           After she was found hanging in her bedroom, your body rattled and heaved until you did not recognize its shape. That night the white bone of the moon rose above the distant hills, settling in its unbounded stillness, and your body yearned forward, outward, falling into it like a promise, and settling.