246 Spiritual poems

From a story of how the tobacco plant came to our people, told to me by my cousin George Coser Jr. It was way back, before there was a way back When time threaded earth and sky. Children were conceived, were born, grew, and walked tall In what we now call a day. There must have been two suns, a bright moon, somehow We had more light than now, sheen Of falling in love playing about Earth’s body In a wild flicker which lit Us up. We who were this planet and yearned for touch. Every planted thought grew plant Ladders to the stars, way back, before there was No way back,Miss Mary Mack. We used to sing along the buttons of her Dress. Our babies are always Our babies. Even back then when time waved through The corn. We knew our plants like Relatives. Their stories were our stories, there Were songs for everything — I Should say “are” songs for every transformation They link between way back and Now, the forever now, a time when a young Mvskoke man and woman Walked through the shimmer of the early evening. They had become as one song. They lay down when it was dark. I can hear their Intimate low-voice talking. How they tease one another with such gut love. Earth makes a bed, with pillow Mounds. And it is there as the night insects sing They conceived their first child. They Will look back as they walk East toward the sunrise. The raw stalks of beginning Will drink the light, root deeply dark into earth. In the tracks of their loving The plant-child emerges, first the seed head, then Leafy, long male body and the white female Flowers of tobacco, or Hece, as the people called it when it called To them.Come here. We were brought To you from those who love you. We will help you.

tonight my sparrows let go the snow into fields of carnations swollen with anger. tonight the three popes proclaim the revolution against teenage television. seals smash their heads bloody their heads on the elevators the paternoster elevators which delays the holding of their conference. tonight my sister the wind's bride gives blood for the cello of the jericho desert which prompts the trombones to hold a protest meeting. tonight I hang your lips like birdseed outside my door and observe through the window their death-struggle with the she vulture. tonight let go the snow

1 I reached heaven and it was syrupy. It was oppressively sweet. Croaking substances stuck to my knees. Of all substances St. Michael was stickiest. I grabbed him and pasted him on my head. I found God a gigantic fly paper. I stayed out of his way. I walked where everything smelled of burnt chocolate. Meanwhile St. Michael was busy with his sword hacking away at my hair. I found Dante standing naked in a blob of honey. Bears were licking his thighs. I snatched St. Michael’s sword and quartered myself in a great circular adhesive. My torso fell upon an elastic equilibrium. As though shot from a sling my torso whizzed at God fly paper. My legs sank into some unimaginable sog. My head, though weighed with the weight of St. Michael, did not fall. Fine strands of multi-colored gum suspended it there. My spirit stopped by my snared torso. I pulled! I yanked! Rolled it left to right! It bruised! It softened! It could not free! The struggle of an Eternity! An Eternity of pulls! of yanks! Went back to my head, St. Michael had sucked dry my brainpan! Skull! My skull! Only skull in heaven! Went to my legs. St. Peter was polishing his sandals with my knees! I pounced upon him! Pummeled his face in sugar in honey in marmalade! Under each arm I fled with my legs! The police of heaven were in hot pursuit! I hid within the sop of St. Francis. Gasping in the confectionery of his gentility I wept, caressing my intimidated legs. 2 They caught me. They took my legs away. They sentenced me in the firmament of an ass. The prison of an Eternity! An Eternity of labor! of hee-haws! Burdened with the soiled raiment of saints I schemed escape. Lugging ampullae its daily fill I schemed escape. I schemed climbing impossible mountains. I schemed under the Virgin’s whip. I schemed to the sound of celestial joy. I schemed to the sound of earth, the wail of infants, the groans of men, the thud of coffins. I schemed escape. God was busy switching the spheres from hand to hand. The time had come. I cracked my jaws. Broke my legs. Sagged belly-flat on plow on pitchfork on scythe. My spirit leaked from the wounds. A whole spirit pooled. I rose from the carcass of my torment. I stood in the brink of heaven. And I swear that Great Territory did quake when I fell, free.

Inside the starboard window of his room in a boat at sea, the piece of earth he's scraped from a dead gull’s leg sprouts eighty different species, green under bell glass. By the sunlight of the oil lamp he makes rain as the wind picks up toward Chiloe, Port Famine, Concepcion, and then Galapagos. Here he finds shipwrecked sailors’ epitaphs cut into the shell of an old tortoise who’s tame enough to ride, too huge to slaughter. Here the birds are fearless. He can catch them with his hands, let them perch on his finger before he breaks their necks and wraps them in his shirt and sets their eggs on branches drifting from the shoreline, island to island. Now everywhere he meets himself. He’s tired, and half the world from home. But his mind has entered the morning the way all the animals kept in his cabin in jars along the wall grow smaller in sequence until the window opens on the sea, so that what he’ll remember are the wasted spaces, the desert rock spread out for miles as if the earth were flat again, dangerous at the horizon, where the stones, piled, shine against lava black. Dew pools in the evenings. A few pale leaves appear.

All transparent things need thunder shirts. The little ghost hanging from an eave, on Underwood Street, a piece of lavender-tinted netting stretched onto a metal frame. The Boston terriers and Chihuahuas patiently wait out storms with their eyes bulging in their special wraparound shirts. My family used to laugh at me sleeping under two down quilts, wearing a wool hat in summer, when I said I was afraid otherwise I would fly up to the ceiling. Once on a sidewalk beside Erie Street around the corner from Underwood where the pointless obsolete tracks run to a dead end on the other side, I found a black and silver rosary, with shining onyx beads, like the ones that you see hanging from the belts of nuns in their habits or priests in their chasubles. I kept it carefully until either I lost it or it got buried in the bottom of a purse abandoned under my bed or in the closet. Clutter keeps me bound to this earth. I told Patti last night that the God-sized hole in me was so big and vacant, voracious and spacious, it was like I was running some kind of desperate toddler’s shape-sorter game, trying to find something that fit to plug into it. I’d stuff anything in there, regardless of whether the shape coincided with the opening. It was like I could look at the sky and attract space junk, broken satellites, spent rocket stages, micrometeoroids, to plug the gap. The wind is its own kind of chaos, sometimes like a sheet of itself tangled or flowing on a celestial clothesline. It needs a weighted blanket. Little red flags on the maple at the corner of Underwood and Erie near the switching yard. Slow-moving locomotives that might be driven by nobody. Flags hold the tree down, mark it, make it know it’s real. Flapping on the flaming maple or falling.

Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snowflake never can you guess what’s on their mind sometimes I can feel what they’re feeling detect it like hairs on the back of my arms, together we live, talk, walk the same sidewalks, to die buried in a foreign cemetery for others to sit upon ponder their own light, why am I free, what must I do, does someone love me like I do, new skin gives way to wrinkles, hair fades to gray, bones grow strong then decay, strength seeps every time one pees, sleeps, ages, loves, muscles grow then shrink the body a temporary vessel destination unknown. April 28, 2002

The voice that beautifies the land! The voice above, The voice of thunder Within the dark cloud Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land. The voice that beautifies the land! The voice below, The voice of the grasshopper Among the plants Again and again it sounds, The voice that beautifies the land.

evening the priest let three rivers flow and a woman sing to her child I am afraid a woman Will burn my hair

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? & what dread feet? What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp! When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Ode’iminibaashkiminasiganke She makes strawberry jam ginagawinad wiishko’aanimad, waaseyaagami mixing sweet wind and shining water miinawaa gipagaa nibwaakaa, with thick wisdom bigishkada’ad, dibaabiiginad pounding, measuring gakina gaa zhawenimangidwa everything we’ve cared for gakina gaa waniangidwa everything we’ve lost nagamowinan waa nagamoyaang the songs we have not yet sung miigwanag waa wawezhi’angidwa the feathers yet to decorate ezhi-zhoomiingweyaangoba and all the ways we’ve smiled mooshkine moodayaabikoong into jars filled to the brim ji-baakaakonid pii bakadeyaang. to be opened when we are thin.