W. S. Di Piero

Places we leave slick our bodies with silky air or foam we feel faithful and tickly (even somehow taste) but can't clearly see. We wear its weight like atmosphere— runs, blots of what we've done in and with each place —what to do with it now?— and what it does to us still.

How often now, raging weeping for the days love gives then takes away, takes from you the slightly chapped hand laid on the one you’re pointing at a tree, and the voice that breathes coffeeberry bush into your mouth. The finger that taps and feathers your ear but the giggle’s gone before you turn around. The sandalwood scent hanging in the room, the auburn strand like a flaw in the porcelain, the off-course nail clipping in the carpet. The days eat into your stomach, knife you with longing for relief from love that you cannot leave or leave alone, from its rings of fire where you won’t burn down to ash or be transformed. You become them, and they keep burning and have a coffeeberry voice. Listen how their rhymes sing the little deaths you live.

The whole world was there, plucking their linen, half-bald, mumbling, sucking on their moustache tips. Broadway was still in business and they asked no favors. All the cracked ribs of Fredericksburg, the boys who held their tongues at Chancellorsville as the bandages, mule shit, skin and shot overran the Rappahannock’s banks and poured it in our mouths that summer. He sat up half the night reading to the Army of the Potomac poems about trooping goats and crazy fathers chewing grass in the wilderness. It’s me that saved his life, dear mother, he had dysentery, bronchitis, and something else the doctors couldn

Eighteen-sixty eighteen sixty-four, six hundred ten thousand men gaseous gray, blackened body parts like chopped wood in Virginia sunshine. Or nineteen-fourteen nineteen-eighteen, trench rats, thousands, big as badgers, rip chines from horse and human flesh. IED's, cluster bombs, punji sticks, primed to shred feet, thighs, spine, sack, yesterday, when we were countless. Conscience says Count them up and be good, suck on me like red candy stick in casual lookaway moments. Protected by neighbors, two girls villagers know to be deficient doll themselves up as bombs for market day's chickens and yams, and like a world-body neural surge, their protectors fly into fatty parts.

In Safeway yesterday, a young man sat on the floor, pulled off   his shoes, granted audience to us, his fellow seekers, and picked his naked feet. He smiled, our brother, at the story he told of   deliverance at the hand of   Master Tombo, lord and creator, whose round energy lives in us surrounds us surrounds our milk our butter our eggs: see Him there, in the Slurpee glaze upon the freezer case? In that elder by the yogurt shelves? I believed his happiness and coveted a tidy universe. He picked his feet while a child whimpered by the melons, her nanny’s mango aura made the cold blown air touch my brain, I smelled myself in my aging body and felt my silly bones collapse again. I wanted Tombo’s dispensation to save this faint believer and the indifferent world that rivers through and past me. Down my aisle lavender respired from the flower stall and Security spoke kind words to our prophet. Oh I love and hate the fickle messy wash of speech and flowers and winds and the tides and crave plain rotund stories to justify our continuity. To the Maya corn was god, spilled blood made corn grow, the blood gods shed watered needy ground and became People who worshipped the corn. Tombo’s grace carries us, convinced, from one inarticulate incoherent moment to the next. Tonight the wet streets and their limelight sigh. Orion turns, burning, unchanged again. Bread rises somewhere and its ovens scent the trees. My poor belief   lives in the only and all of   the slur of   what these are, and what these are streams toward loss in moments we live through. As children we were lost in our opaque acts but fresh and full in time. I remember how I touched a girlish knee, how one boy broke another’s face, how we all stood in hard gray summer rain so it would run down the tips of noses to our tongues.

You’re still there in the spectral impress, the plied afterimage grid of trucks and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief, and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest on silver rails, flare into the coming dark, while everywhere your hungry light still tries to reconstruct itself, charm the space in and around the looseknit ironworks, winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past the dark. From here, two years away, I see in your middle distance a trestle stretched between two brownstones, the whole scene droning deep: the train tears through the gap, ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares that flick past like old sluggish film, each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact, and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up around those strangers abiding in the glass.

Snarls, bread trucks, yeast breathing inside huddled bags, and sleepers completing lives behind their gray windows. A whistle on the phonewires, feathers, twitches, whistling down to the hot loaves. Reeds everywhere, pulse, flesh, flutes, and wakened sighs. An answer. Radio news and breathers behind our windows, birds’ new voices changing, changed, to the unforgiving hunger screech of immigrants.

It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay train’s strungout hoo , deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tiled dome: he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue , while we all wait to be chuted to car lot or home, closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed, every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.

It seems to head from its last stop too fast, my transbay train’s strung-out hoo, deep inside the tunnel, and starts to bleed into the baritone wail of that guy at platform’s end, a sort of lullaby rubbed against the wall then caught in a squall of wind darkening toward us, his whippy voice skinning its tired song off the tiled dome: he’s determined, the silky lyric says, to be independently blue, while we all wait to be chuted to car lot or home, closer to love, or farther, and sooner to loss, our bashful shoes and arms like lives crossed, every plural presence now some thing alone, thanks to our singer-man. We wait for the train, patient with hope, a hope that’s like complaint.

That marsh hawk, its blown-leaf flight across Tomales Bay fog, summer’s abraded light, the Pacific tide pressuring and squeezing wave on wave into the bay’s pinched inlet. . . We feel somehow between us still water crushed by that sea, so constant it seems not to be. The hawk, a circus, tumbles, stops, stands upon the air, beats its wings as if to shoo the sun’s drenched veils, and its clapping wings stop our unstoppable argument, that love goes, who knows why, and delivers us from pain to pain, air with teeth that seems to eat more air. Northern harrier, owl face, they sea-changed your name, who listens with your face and shows not love but want, speed, life in flight toward, forever toward, pausing at every chance to use what ocean-born bayside air sustains you by resisting you. We thank your sunken head bones and wild close-to-water seeking that somehow speaks to us, delivers us to another amazed agonized place.