That evening the Beloved came, and with sleight of hand, unfastened an old corset around my heart I hadn’t known I was wearing, opening flood gates, sending up wreckage of shame and regret – some mine, some other’s – burdens that barged, never belonged but had docked there.
Each unhooking released a binding of weights: one unleashed a cry of my mother and my mother’s mother and the sounds of her motherland, until a strangling aah note was freed.
Then each loosened lace, let in an eyelet of sky — exposing filmy layers of old images fading, burning away, all cover until I was naked – in the light of night
If you stay dry and under cover you’ll miss the newly washed world outside.
You can still catch remains of the potent draft – heavenly dew hanging in the air, too light to have fallen with the rain.
And the wind’s sweet breath is here too, come from many worlds away, muttering with a distant tongue, murmuring the finest fragments of the first words.
Mingle with this good company, be doused clean with resurrected water, get baptized in this instant.
Breathe in the pristine air-dew that has journeyed for countless years, been spun by planets, pulled by comets, lit by stars — refashioned light.
If you close your eyes, drink in slowly the lingering water, you might taste Jupiter.
I’m being watched. The wide-open eye of the moon sees through my filmy curtain, pulls the cover off my sleep, draws me to her hypnotic gaze.
I attempt to cobble dream wisps into my night awakening, but all that might be sensical is incinerated in her white light absorbed into Her aliveness —
Her unhurried whirling dance unveiling the naked darkness disappearing and returning in the thinnest veil our eyes detect — thread by thread exposing her cloak of light.
Now in fullness her mercurial pouring, shimmering back like a signaling lighthouse, calling her story out of us in rhythms of gaping time, enchanting the rise and sway of the ocean and each creature’s throbbing birth.
White Goddess Rib of the Earth— our awakened dream.
Only one stone is used for the buildings of Jerusalem.
Native rock of this land, I speak to you.
Your long-withstanding and broken face, is everywhere here:
A face that is a crypt of civilizations. Your pores like eyes squinting in the sun, witnessing from your dense silence.
Could the sum of reverent visitors and mortared prayers know the apocalypse petrified inside you?
You are the teeth of the skyline speaking out in different tongues: a ferment of sweet and hardened voices, of calls, prayers and curses commingling in a dissonance – a drone of unresolved diversity.
Stone of Jerusalem, your body – colors of flesh – pink and white, ochre and tawny – lifted from your calcified underground sea, carved into bricks.
Brick upon brick — foundation stones upon which the Holy Temples, churches and mosques aspire to bridge earth to heaven.
Bring down the prophets! I want to see them – all of them – from posts of different times, gathered together here speaking in tongues of light – hands beaming upon one another, each giving honor to one another, rejoicing in glorious communion, joined with echoing choirs of Hallelujah.
What is hard in us will someday turn to stone. What is light will rejoin the stars.
So you’re not a songbird, more a janitor in the subway, a low-down beggar on Broadway.
Few birders pull out binoculars to watch you up close.
And your diet! Who’d want to try it? What would a taxidermist find inside?
You’re not prized and preserved by hot-shot hunters.
But you’re not squealing, dive bombing or complaining about your lot. And frankly, there’s something endearing in your coo.
So what if you’re not one of the colorful ones? Your lawful feathers of concrete gray suit you with distinguished subtlety.
Those penetrating yellow, blood-shot eyes evoke a certain sympathy, but your iridescent ruff of amethyst and jade remains your visible allotment from heaven, family jewels of the disregarded angels.
Behold the taut bud, amassed within it, a serene cloister of petals, in deep contemplation, poised in prayer, as precious substance subtly streams through in anointment, swelling them in fiery concentration, awaiting the moment – when the sun pierces their seal and they are burnt open on the altar of their thorny spine, unfurling a choir of petals whose song is color’s radiance, whose emanation is incense sublime, in their bestowal of ecstasy.
