Diaries

Diary

Nothing that’s left to do contains a map. We wander separately until the bar closes and all the patrons go home. A mother breaks a plate at midnight. A car careens down an empty street, its driver seeking strength to end it all. The boy who’s brought a gun to school cries on tv. Actions trump words. No description can suffice when one imagines the tortured moments of his youth. Anger wins the day as flowers reach their tender stalks toward an apex near the sun.

Diary

A forest of words opening like that bone-white flower growing with the mushrooms at the base of the cypress. Nothing is born whole, which is to say we make ourselves by and in relation. Feather and stone glistening by the riverbed are part of the venture. Milton’s furious angels and the pair of eyes reading the words. A train and its trek over the twisted route a mountain makes. The word and the hour of its invention by a woman reading in her dimly-lit room: all she knows of Paradise.

Diary

I know you exist in books I take up just to find you, often just a footnote or entry in an index. They are giving thanks for you, you who could outrun them all and find your place at any table. You, knowing the tiniest bones in my ear and making them vibrate with an ecstasy of sounds. I see you now, holding the rope that is my life. Until further notice, hang on tight.

Diary

Horror and honor are virtually twins, cousins at least. Your horror of broken worlds and citizens buried alive is our honor. In horror you find the bodies: in honor we boast of our resolve. Your horror of tornados or elderberry wine or squeaky floors--our honor at existing and vexing you out of your state of repose. The world calls to us in many voices: the haunting one of someone lost to you stands next to a lullaby, a sweetly remembered kiss, wet and bespoke, the last notes reaching in “Adagio for Strings.” The world strains to contain the horror of silence that fills a room in Syria or Yemen or Ukraine after the bombs rain down, honoring each victory, which is a horror uncontainable by those of us wanting to live in unity as trees do, their underground root systems sending melodies unheard by the forest. The bomb-sniffing dog doesn’t understand, his nose a sensing instrument. To him it is a science of sorts to smell the rich bouquet of chemicals.

Diary
After reading Laura Ulewicz (1930-1977)

I read her work celebrating gardens: but the words have an edge, as if tiny spikes are scattered to subvert the scene. Of course a metaphor, as is the garden itself. The woman whose poems ended their first life in a box decades ago is now a voice to notice, its vividness a fealty to life. We scatter her words like wisps of March grass in this season of peril and growth.

Diary

Ants invaded the peony bulbs while under the vast face of sky, fireflies sent their signals. We lit sparklers and ran in circles. Bedtime came and went. While in the world, napalm ravaged a jungle, and in our own South, dogs and water cannons spread their hate: that too, your childhood. No paradise: only time and its casual indifference through which you see the ravaging ants, their persistence.