Refuge Temple

refuge temple 254 Purdy Street, Buffalo, NY, childhood home of Lucille Clifton There will be another storm always on the air Or in the air or are you the air Cold unrecognizable following The inside road This vessel bears one through Snow or time to find the house Paint peeling and maybe unfamiliar but the address Is to a place that doesn’t exist anymore An empty lot Now owned by the woman Next door who leases it to a Storefront church that needs the space for parking I take a selfie with the snowbank 254 Purdy Street Sunday morning they will plow and cars will fill the place Worshippers filing next door Names of the family who lived here forgotten Sayles their name was Sayles Well there’s Miss Bowden says the neighbor Who lives over there Ninety years old Lived here her whole life If anyone’d remember she would Though if the house don’t hold against the world And the body don’t hold against the world Snow falling down What can hold The church house the neighbor next door The snow Old Miss Bowden This empty lot We empty now Everybody drive home Song done over Snow river hover House is gone Stormsent era That Miss Bowden may remember The twelve-fingered girl who lived here We tell the neighbor: her name was Lucille Playing in the street Afraid of the dark Bringing the light salon des refusés East Side, Cleveland, OH, apartment building of Julie Patton In the house of Julie Patton Bumblebees do sing pollen In the cave of ears Every thing listens Jimi, Barack, and Marilyn Buck The saints of the place In vigil of excellent beings Light poles hold typical beasts Though here they empty themselves Into me Orange spaces do make A world again for though the gods are mythic The goddesses spin Dear Julie sing Me through the long hallway The dark one sleeved in your mother’s States of mind State of mine is the one that opens my body In heat through dark and salted moments Body is a book House does quiver Unwritten the way of how to find you House is the book In the language of feathers that launch Whose heart could race Winter air winter season that rushes How we in dark are slung The dark that opens its hallways Time mastered by Shiva and Hanuman I did stand in the empty space Filled by snow Then here in the sun-flirted front room Watched by Saint Nina Simone and Saint Joan Baez and Saint 
Buffy Sainte-Marie I wonder forward in Sapphic tongue Who is remember me Who is open me with their tongue Who languages the space of a house that don’t exist Better thought sun see Julie sing sanctified Sing swung sing one and one and one and one school house Barrington, Rhode Island, right near the Bay, home of C.D. Wright 
and Forrest Gander When she gives me directions and describes it to me I expect a red-room schoolhouse Driving across the water from Providence Into the stream-laced far shore Far shore where a boat unlands To determine the shape of what isn’t There I drive past wrong streets Wrong houses places whose bells I ring Stranger in the forest and dark-skinned too Where do I belong From the bathhouse I came Where I worshiped at all manner of strange altars Does this make me more or less human Tongue makes you human And how it translates the body into language To find the door as it was described to me Frosted glass and Japanese characters lining it School saying the language of the sun No sums add up here But she calls me in And I frown to know long to know What holds the house against the world How will words survive the dissolution of the body Of the planet’s core Sore and soar it came down through the cloud cover Gray-white curtains House of a dozen languages At the cold lake the far away lake She grabbed me post-lecture where I told about how I could not translate the words of the poet until I came to her own sun-loved city She begged me to always love all manner of strangers I thought she meant the regions of the body I’d have promised her anything though years later in Rhode Island Named for an island no one can find Lover I love you forever House that disappeared Books that live in the air Island that no one knows While on Purdy Street good people park their cars in the snow Go inside and sing We don’t have nothing more than this anymore No planet no lover no words no nothing no more