36 Healing poems

She pays attention to the hair, not her fingers, and cuts herself once or twice a day.   Doesn’t notice anymore, just if the blood starts flowing.   Says, Excuse me, to the customer and walks away for a band-aid.   Same spot on the middle finger over and over, raised like a callus.   Also the nicks where she snips between her fingers, the torn webbing.   Also spider veins on her legs now, so ugly, though she sits in a chair for half of each cut, rolls around from side to side.   At night in the winter she sleeps in white cotton gloves, Neosporin on the cuts, vitamin E, then heavy lotion.   All night, for weeks, her white hands lie clothed like those of a young girl going to her first party.   Sleeping alone, she opens and closes her long scissors and the hair falls under her hands.   It’s a good living, kind of like an undertaker, the people keep coming, and the hair, shoulder length, French twist, braids.   Someone has to cut it.   At the end she whisks and talcums my neck.   Only then can I bend and see my hair, how it covers the floor, curls and clippings of brown and silver, how it shines like a field of scythed hay beneath my feet.

Someday compassion would demand I set myself free of my desire to recreate my father, indulge in my mother’s losses, strangle lovers with words, forcing them to confess for me and take the blame. Today was that day: I tossed them, sheet by sheet on the patio and gathered them into a pyre. I wanted to let them go in a blaze, tiny white dwarfs imploding beside the azaleas and ficus bushes, let them crackle, burst like winged seeds, let them smolder into gossamer embers— a thousand gray butterflies in the wind. Today was that day, but it rained, kept raining. Instead of fire, water—drops knocking on doors, wetting windows into mirrors reflecting me in the oaks. The garden walls and stones swelling into ghostlier shades of themselves, the wind chimes giggling in the storm, a coffee cup left overflowing with rain. Instead of burning, my pages turned into water lilies floating over puddles, then tiny white cliffs as the sun set, finally drying all night under the moon into papier-mâché souvenirs. Today the rain would not let their lives burn.

I surrender my weapons: Catapult Tears, Rain-Cloud Hat, Lip Zip, Brittle Coat, Taut Teeth in guarded rows. Pluck this plate of armor from my ear, drop it in the Amnesty Bin, watch my sadness land among the dark shapes of memory. Unarmed, now see me saunter past Ticking Baggage, Loaded Questions, Gangs of Doubt; my love equips me. I swear, ever since your cheeky face span round I trust this whole bloody world.

And so their pounded hearts were worn— like a badge or talisman, that canceled almost all their blindness— creation's linkage depending on a drive itself derived from a kind of kindness or desperation, the sense that one's inadequate, at any rate the space for time— water has it, flowing (even from a faucet . . .) and here the black swan glides across it— as the sunlight's suddenly on my back, and now the skin along it's warmer, Lord, which lets me walk by the river . . .

The time is important here—not because this has been a long winter or because it is my first at home since childhood—but because there is so much else to be unsure of. We are on the brink of an invasion. At a time like this how is it that when I left only a week ago there was three feet of snow on the ground, and now there is none, not even a single patch on in the shadow of the fence-line. And to think I paid a cousin twenty dollars to shovel the walk. He and two of his buddies, still smelling of an all-nighter, arrived at 7 am to begin their work. When I left them a while later and noticed their ungloved hands, winter made me feel selfish and unsure. This ground seems unsure of itself for its own reasons and we do not gauge enough of our lives by changes in temperature. When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle. It started with a death that I tried to say was unjust, not because of the actual dying, but because of what was left. What time of year was that? I have still not yet learned to write of war. I have friends who speak out—as is necessary— with subtle and unsubtle force. But I am from this place and a great deal has been going wrong for some time now. The two young Indian boys who almost drowned last night in the fast-rising creek near school are casualties in any case. There have been too many just like them and I have no way to fix these things. A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week about not having the intelligence to take as subject for his poems anything other than his own life. For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood: This poem was never supposed to mention itself, other writers, or me. But I will not regret that those boys made it home, or that the cousins used the money at the bar. Still, there are no lights on this street. Still, there is so much mud outside that we carry it indoors with us.

and who are you now in this different blue space without pain remarking on chemtrails and snowmelt,   misreading the “sea” whose letters cease to arrive remain transfixed in midflight       turbulent coasts aloft as a principle of life-- count invisible clams under nameless sands cut apostrophes into the air     announcements send far-flung greetings to strangers for days keep the magma enigma at bay        daily joys effaced vaporous pale generous smoke rising so cling to the dark hand inside you its basalt fingers, rounded

I'll know when i'm ready not because someone tells me but because one day the thought of you will be just a thought not a wound not a weight just a thing that happened once

What helped: the friend who didn't ask questions the long walks the one good song on repeat the morning i woke up and felt something that wasn't nothing

Tuesday nights at the meeting same folding chairs same bad coffee same honest people the most honest room i've ever been in

I had a good week and then a bad one and then a good two days and then yesterday recovery isn't linear everyone says this it's still annoying when you feel it