He finds her work the way a cut finds salt—
by accident, by hunger, by the old compass that turns toward ache.
He sits with the pixeled book open like a door blown inland by weather,
a shore lamp shaking in his bones. He reads, and the room grows ribs.
"I read through several of her works, and I know something is happening. It's poetic second-hand smoke, and it's peeling me open like a rotten tangerine."
He says it aloud in silence, rough as a match head. The grammar is a bruise that fits.
Sense arrives anyway, the way rain arrives—springtime leaking through every seam in the thípi.
A procession starts: not saints, not soldiers—memories with their comms call-sign tags still on, like maybe Соловейко,
mud-dried and whistling. The pages drum like rails under a long, slow freight.
He feels the engine in blood-edged scabs, those spare rooms he avoids at dusk.
*"Each clever phrase grabs hold somehow of one of my new or old scars by its jagged corners
and makes unhealed-but-ancient so stinging fresh again."*
He doesn’t hide from his own thought or feeling. He lets it bite. It knows where to chew, between parking lots and front lines.
Whitman's ghost hums from the rafters, a wide-backed hymn of catalog and breath;
The spirit of Lorca comes from the well, carrying the dark fruit that stains the hands.
Between them, a wire is strung; sparrows of thought land, burn, fly.
"This is healing, I know, but am I strong enough to take the pain?"
The question has shoulders. It sits beside him and refuses to leave.
He doesn’t argue. He lights the pipe like a prayer and he shares with all three of their spirits the stubborn smoke.
Her words do not flatter any memories. They instead inventory him:
the winter with the thin coat and the thicker silence,
the slip of a shared name that clanged like a dropped pan in a quiet kitchen,
photographs that looked away first, and the noon he hid in a midnight pocket.
All of it itemized in the ledger of her lines, stamped PAID IN SALT.
*"How is every single line somehow about me, about a specific memory?
How did she steal my life and write it so large in her verse?
I never really realised she was ever listening."*
He isn’t bothered by the theft. This mystical thief left everything where he could finally find it.
Some stanzas arrive like ambulances, so very late but still siren-loud;
others are wolves circling the bivouac of his certainty.
They do not attack. They kneel and drink from his canteen of breath.
He reads the same line thrice, a pilgrim looping a street of wounds—
a poetic Via Delarosa where lamplight wears a crown of thumbprints—
and at the third turn he fully finally trips over the hinge of that single, grave sentence:
“his breath the drag that tears what we love into the mud.”
The line lifts its face. He knows it. He wrote it once by living it.
Grief is not a river here; it is the map of rivers dried into his palms.
He spreads them, and her just-now-arrived poetry journal rains.
He closes it, yet her journal still thunders anyway,
She still The-Daughter-of-Thunder, Sacred Clown.
He speaks to the screen as to a tactical medic in a ruined stairwell:
"Tell me where the tourniquet goes; tell me which silence to cut."
This last poem of hers answers by leaning closer, knifing the bandage cleanly.
All these things her words have done by happenstance:
stitched a lighthouse into a bruise, nailed a wind to the doorframe,
taught his ghosts to hold their breath until the tide decides.
He lets the waves count him. He lets the counting hurt.
He is not cured. He remains numbered, but realizes fresh it is a kind of belonging with his keenly absent treasures.
In blue-filtered glow, he gives up the argument with mercy.
He again writes in imaginary margin, not as a note but as a pulse:
*"I read through several of her works, and I know something is happening. It's poetic second-hand smoke, and it's peeling me open like a rotten tangerine..
Each clever phrase grabs hold somehow of one of my new or old scars by its jagged corners
and makes unhealed-but-ancient so fresh again.
This is a healing and a wounding both, I know, but am I strong enough to take the pain?
How is every single line somehow about me, about a specific memory?
How did she steal my life and write it so large in her verse?
…‘his breath the drag that tears what we love into the mud.’”*
The imaginary ink dries like a small dusk.
Outside, a fresh rush of tourists in Old Town and the ordinary world invents and invades with the sound of tires on wet streets by a line of cars and they're all painted black ...
Inside, he resolves to keep reading her—
not because her poems spare him,
but because they do not ... but it is enough for now.
One does not have to try to do it all in a single day,
no matter what that it is.
That is axiomatic, fully self-evident once the
norepinephrine loosens its grip just a tiny bit.
Yes, he has many years left ahead, good and bad still,
for good and bad are just the way of things.
The lamp lowers its voices to hushes, and the margins lean in,
for her words have stolen & reserved all that is left of his soul for the night ...
~ ~ ~
Afterthoughts
Art works best
when it’s close enough
that the ones who were there
can point at every glint and say,
“that’s the room, that’s the track, that’s the smile.”
But it works best, too,
when it carries just enough mist
that everyone else
only sees words of wonder —
light coming through darkened glass —
and still knows:
this touches the part of the world
the five senses can’t invoice
and the mind can’t diagram.
That’s the sweet spot:
specific for the circle,
opaque for the crowd.
Like speaking in many tongues —
one utterance,
but each listener hears it
in the language of their own
lived hurt,
lived healing,
lived almost-lost-them.
That’s what we’re trying to do here:
keep all the real details warm in our pockets,
show only the shine,
and let whoever reads
try it on
and find —
to their surprise —
that it fits.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
*For my late daughter, Sr. Angelika-Wanáȟča, killed in a Russian terrorist Iskandar missile attack while she was feeding the hungry as an aid worker, upon being given ALL her very voluminous poetry journals by her best friend from her old convent over two years after her death.
It was, it is a miracle to me, over 9,000 poems all for me to read my baby girl's mind, heart, and spirit. My "First Blossom Found In Springtime", my youngest girl, dead just days after turning 27, she found her way back to me in her words then instead of only my dreams, in what she did, in what she did not, in what dreamed of, and what dreams she had the came true, or were on their way to coming true.
When she died I burned all the maps, if you understand, but here were new maps for me, and now her words are with me the whole day and night through, every single day and night, silence is a long forgotten thing, and it is good, her poetry owns all the real estate in my head, my heart, and my soul, and the sound of her voice now never, ever will need to stop again...
**For My Anieliki, Happy 20th, love Dad!!
Aŋpétu kiŋ wóčhaŋtkiye wašté yuhá yó Wanáȟča!**
Dad for Blossom, Between the Bars (Elliott Smith) https://tinyurl.com/ForMeLilCherub March 15th 2015
**Angelika Agnes Darlene Wanáȟča Pokorny-Reihl
March 15th 1995 - April 23rd 2022**
*
Mar 29
Mar 29, 2026 at 11:39 PM UTC
He finds her work the way a cut finds salt—
by accident, by hunger, by the old compass that turns toward ache.
He sits with the pixeled book open like a door blown inland by weather,
a shore lamp shaking in his bones. He reads, and the room grows ribs.
"I read through several of her works, and I know something is happening. It's poetic second-hand smoke, and it's peeling me open like a rotten tangerine."
He says it aloud in silence, rough as a match head. The grammar is a bruise that fits.
Sense arrives anyway, the way rain arrives—springtime leaking through every seam in the thípi.
A procession starts: not saints, not soldiers—memories with their comms call-sign tags still on, like maybe Соловейко,
mud-dried and whistling. The pages drum like rails under a long, slow freight.
He feels the engine in blood-edged scabs, those spare rooms he avoids at dusk.
*"Each clever phrase grabs hold somehow of one of my new or old scars by its jagged corners
and makes unhealed-but-ancient so stinging fresh again."*
He doesn’t hide from his own thought or feeling. He lets it bite. It knows where to chew, between parking lots and front lines.
Whitman's ghost hums from the rafters, a wide-backed hymn of catalog and breath;
The spirit of Lorca comes from the well, carrying the dark fruit that stains the hands.
Between them, a wire is strung; sparrows of thought land, burn, fly.
"This is healing, I know, but am I strong enough to take the pain?"
The question has shoulders. It sits beside him and refuses to leave.
He doesn’t argue. He lights the pipe like a prayer and he shares with all three of their spirits the stubborn smoke.
Her words do not flatter any memories. They instead inventory him:
the winter with the thin coat and the thicker silence,
the slip of a shared name that clanged like a dropped pan in a quiet kitchen,
photographs that looked away first, and the noon he hid in a midnight pocket.
All of it itemized in the ledger of her lines, stamped PAID IN SALT.
*"How is every single line somehow about me, about a specific memory?
How did she steal my life and write it so large in her verse?
I never really realised she was ever listening."*
He isn’t bothered by the theft. This mystical thief left everything where he could finally find it.
Some stanzas arrive like ambulances, so very late but still siren-loud;
others are wolves circling the bivouac of his certainty.
They do not attack. They kneel and drink from his canteen of breath.
He reads the same line thrice, a pilgrim looping a street of wounds—
a poetic Via Delarosa where lamplight wears a crown of thumbprints—
and at the third turn he fully finally trips over the hinge of that single, grave sentence:
“his breath the drag that tears what we love into the mud.”
The line lifts its face. He knows it. He wrote it once by living it.
Grief is not a river here; it is the map of rivers dried into his palms.
He spreads them, and her just-now-arrived poetry journal rains.
He closes it, yet her journal still thunders anyway,
She still The-Daughter-of-Thunder, Sacred Clown.
He speaks to the screen as to a tactical medic in a ruined stairwell:
"Tell me where the tourniquet goes; tell me which silence to cut."
This last poem of hers answers by leaning closer, knifing the bandage cleanly.
All these things her words have done by happenstance:
stitched a lighthouse into a bruise, nailed a wind to the doorframe,
taught his ghosts to hold their breath until the tide decides.
He lets the waves count him. He lets the counting hurt.
He is not cured. He remains numbered, but realizes fresh it is a kind of belonging with his keenly absent treasures.
In blue-filtered glow, he gives up the argument with mercy.
He again writes in imaginary margin, not as a note but as a pulse:
*"I read through several of her works, and I know something is happening. It's poetic second-hand smoke, and it's peeling me open like a rotten tangerine..
Each clever phrase grabs hold somehow of one of my new or old scars by its jagged corners
and makes unhealed-but-ancient so fresh again.
This is a healing and a wounding both, I know, but am I strong enough to take the pain?
How is every single line somehow about me, about a specific memory?
How did she steal my life and write it so large in her verse?
…‘his breath the drag that tears what we love into the mud.’”*
The imaginary ink dries like a small dusk.
Outside, a fresh rush of tourists in Old Town and the ordinary world invents and invades with the sound of tires on wet streets by a line of cars and they're all painted black ...
Inside, he resolves to keep reading her—
not because her poems spare him,
but because they do not ... but it is enough for now.
One does not have to try to do it all in a single day,
no matter what that it is.
That is axiomatic, fully self-evident once the
norepinephrine loosens its grip just a tiny bit.
Yes, he has many years left ahead, good and bad still,
for good and bad are just the way of things.
The lamp lowers its voices to hushes, and the margins lean in,
for her words have stolen & reserved all that is left of his soul for the night ...
~ ~ ~
Afterthoughts
Art works best
when it’s close enough
that the ones who were there
can point at every glint and say,
“that’s the room, that’s the track, that’s the smile.”
But it works best, too,
when it carries just enough mist
that everyone else
only sees words of wonder —
light coming through darkened glass —
and still knows:
this touches the part of the world
the five senses can’t invoice
and the mind can’t diagram.
That’s the sweet spot:
specific for the circle,
opaque for the crowd.
Like speaking in many tongues —
one utterance,
but each listener hears it
in the language of their own
lived hurt,
lived healing,
lived almost-lost-them.
That’s what we’re trying to do here:
keep all the real details warm in our pockets,
show only the shine,
and let whoever reads
try it on
and find —
to their surprise —
that it fits.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
*For my late daughter, Sr. Angelika-Wanáȟča, killed in a Russian terrorist Iskandar missile attack while she was feeding the hungry as an aid worker, upon being given ALL her very voluminous poetry journals by her best friend from her old convent over two years after her death.
It was, it is a miracle to me, over 9,000 poems all for me to read my baby girl's mind, heart, and spirit. My "First Blossom Found In Springtime", my youngest girl, dead just days after turning 27, she found her way back to me in her words then instead of only my dreams, in what she did, in what she did not, in what dreamed of, and what dreams she had the came true, or were on their way to coming true.
When she died I burned all the maps, if you understand, but here were new maps for me, and now her words are with me the whole day and night through, every single day and night, silence is a long forgotten thing, and it is good, her poetry owns all the real estate in my head, my heart, and my soul, and the sound of her voice now never, ever will need to stop again...
**For My Anieliki, Happy 20th, love Dad!!
Aŋpétu kiŋ wóčhaŋtkiye wašté yuhá yó Wanáȟča!**
Dad for Blossom, Between the Bars (Elliott Smith) https://tinyurl.com/ForMeLilCherub March 15th 2015
**Angelika Agnes Darlene Wanáȟča Pokorny-Reihl
March 15th 1995 - April 23rd 2022**
*
🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍🖤❤️💛🤍
https://tinyurl.com/PtesanwinBringingMirToUkrayina
