an abundance of truths became clear to me after we met
that the voices in my hands are extensions of myself and not to be silenced
to silence them is to silence my truest self

1
The sky is not a barrier but a portal.
Study carefully.  
It may be your only way out.

I stood on the landing
Mouthing words to your friend
When you charged up the stairs
Screaming “Then one of you must be dead!”

I looked at him, at you,
At the pallid wonder in your eyes
When I took that first step
Backward and upward and out
Into the thinning air,
Felt the blank relief of weightlessness.

I floated softly onto the stage
Into a play with trumpets.
Only a rehearsal, the theatre empty.
At a signal from a bald man,
The chorus held its final note.
I had arrived.
They relaxed and the purple curtain fell.

Dance was the shape her body gave to music.

The first time I saw Los Angeles,
it was after midnight.
Descending from Cajon pass and
entering the chaos of light and
the formless poetry of traffic,
I thought of Ezra Pound’s line from near the end of the Cantos:
“I cannot make it cohere.”
“It” is the most important word in that sentence.
In language we can conjure wholes too big for us to comprehend.
Push hard enough, and names fade and pronouns are all we have left.
So what is this place?

Forgetting is the only clarity.*

It was a day of forgetting.
No unquiet dreams or
casual reunions with the dead
who wander the halls of sleep,
the bodies of someone else’s loss.
No ghosts in the gazebo.
No echoes in the fading light.

Exiting sleep’s empty waiting room,
She woke. Blue sky blinked into her eyes.  
The room’s climate began to clear.
There was writing on the wall.
Old fragments came to closure.
The windows slowly turned to mirrors.

She fiddled. She soared.  
She played with her ancestors’ building blocks.
She lent a myth to god.
She stood in a garden with five black stones.
She foretold an eclipse,
Burned the witch of winter,
Stepped in the same river twice.

The moment froze.
Then there it was.
The compound inviolate paradox
at the heart of things,
the answer flickering in light and shade,
to the sound of a child’s voice,
then the roaring wind.
She chuckled as it faded to a point of light
then vanished, like the picture on an old TV,
Like the moon shrinking into the alarm clock’s face.

Her breath brewed clouds above her forehead.
She sat aloof in the empty air,
Alone in the immense morning,
At rest in this inviolable disconnection,
the clear cold innocence of now.