Frogs of the Pogrom

There is no single answer to the question

What is Poetry? Only a thousand shades of green

in a swamp. A thousand bodies

piled in a holocaust. A thousand

mathematicians scribbling with the

same piece of chalk.

I grew up in a tree-house made of pine.

Termites took their places in

the stage. Exterminators stretched a tent

around the rooms. For a week my family

left their beds behind.

After the toxic circus moved to another house,

another town, another population of unwanted

wings and mouths . . . . .

I found two dead frogs beneath the outside stairs.

One frog had its arm

around the other frog.

Now, when professors ask

the inevitable question: What is Poetry?

I tell them poetry is the sound

those frogs made

when the Vikane gas turned on.

Not the normal, amphibian lovesong,

but the sound of two souls

helping each other

back into the dark.

She swam without the ordinary, oceanic fears:

flailing breaths-----sharks moving

through their own mercury, mime’s faces screaming out of foam,

red ribbons of dead pirates lost beneath the work of waves.

She swam without thinking of salt stripping her hair,

without considering the blueness, the buoyancy of breasts

or the heaviness of waterlogged bones.

She swam on one side of her body, a single ear listening

to squirrelfish, the other to the sun’s warm mouth.

The wind pushed in and out. Her fins had always been familiar.

She swam like this for what seemed a century, the moon

began to ask the stars if they knew her name, as if she was

a constant thing, as if she were one of them.

And there was no ark, no architect, just the swell of green

along the coastline, the ballads of sand, the shadows

of no one in particular. The land of wandering.

At last, her feet began to touch down on small stones; her flesh

felt its old gravity again. With one foot on the shore and one

still wreathed in water, she looked over her shoulder at the hurricane.

She watched his black rain churning

and could not choose

between swimming and walking home.

The hurricane watched her like a lover

who believed he could grow small.

This hesitation became their lives.

So that she would never again sleep

in the bed her father built with his bare hands.

So that she would never feel her skin go dry again.

So that he would always keep

his distance from the shore.

Into The Day of Saturn

Happy Valentine’s Day to you. May your face appear in every parted locket and every disowned scallop shell. May the color blue behold your body while sun washes your shoulders near the window. May gorgeous creatures invest their lives to understand the borders you mark between your flesh and your mind.

Happy Valentine’s while we still have a chance. Happy Valentine’s while breath still moves her broom across the floorboards of belief. You belong to love as birds belong to trees, as snails belong to swirls, as musk belongs to the hunt, as phlebotomy belongs to vampires, as rings belong to phalanges and promises, as corn belongs to crows, as trophies belong to illusions, as grapes belong to the blossoming of taste, as ponds belong to the thirst of ponies, as wheels belong to roads, as shadows belong to the ache of heat, as oars belong to wake, and as happiness belongs to the capricious pangs of the soul.

Bliss to your Valentine’s. Roam wide on Thor’s day until it becomes Friday, then sleep deeply into the day of Saturn. Fasten your cape to the sorrow of a mule. Give birth to your bawling intellect and become light as a child again. Write in apocryphal veracity. Roll your eyes at the stars. Shave your head until it pulses as smoothly as a human heart. Punch your fears in the face and run laughing into the arbors. Throw your body of pine needles into the fires of fate. Because we have today and only today. Because we have Valentine’s and only Valentine’s. Because we are. Awake and come forward alone to the place where you will meet a lover with mistletoe eyelashes, a lust as muscular as the demon who shovels coal in Hell, and eyes for only you; a lover who refuses to relent or acknowledge the despair of the world; a lover who is as much at ease with actions as with words; a lover who laces fingers with you more tightly than frozen shoe-laces and walks until you both are suffused with constellations of branches, asphalt orphanages of paper and mud, the sound of one river boring into the black. Suffused with red light in lonely windows, the ghosts of brevity and butterflies, listless mandolins, cartographer’s plunging dreams, the exhausted oxen of discipline, and the scent of a thousand seasons surrendering to each other beneath the circus tent of time.

Valentine’s of Happiness: May your visions conquer without combat; may your apples swell and spin upon their stems like dizzy globes; may your love come to you soon and never leave; may your crayons last forever and your glue seal every wound; may your slaughtered spoon-billed platypuses rise from their watery graves; may your clovers make love to luck in bittersweet fields; may your lunar and your solar meet against a sea of sand; may your lips refuse the kiss unless your heart is home; may euphoria find you in the place where you are lonely; may penguins sew all oceans into faith; may you light a billion candles with your mind; may your peaches fall like heroes and legends in your mouth.

Happy Valentine’s. Go outside. Stay in Love. Oil your heart more thoroughly than a gun or a Tinman; oil it with the milk of jasmine and the sweat of poppies. Use poems for rags because the heart is no machine and the grease is pure and plentiful.

When you talk in your sleep, tell your hopes that you are on the way. Warm them with sound instead of light. They listen to you. Reassure them. They know why you cry sometimes and cannot sleep. They loiter like homeless kings outside these walls and wait for bravery to manifest.

News from the bodega

where they sell the simple anchovies of love,

still swimming, in paper cups.

Buy me because I shimmer, like a comet

no one remembers until sleep, like an

earthworm painted silver, like

the shadow thrown by peace.

There is no such thing as either, or.

Take the paddle in your hands or let it go.

This river is a corsair of black ribbons;

it robs us but it takes us there.

You have no reason to believe in this papyrus;

come take the news directly from my lips.

I speak the language of fire while I am drowning.

Like a chimney that floods once

in a hundred years.

Phoenix

When a love is going home, to

where ever it is it goes. To a room

of white walls and foam. To the spine

of a dying rainbow. It folds and

unfolds its wings a few times, shaking

out the people who have failed to keep

their promises. Throwing off the

salt of infidelities, that have so long

hovered over hearts, like clouds

of dust above two rainless roads;

like a moon above a planet without seas.

A departing love licks one finger

and tests the sky for wind. It releases every

hand it ever held. It strips itself of

words and leaves them piled on the ground.

Its nakedness hurts us, because it’s something

we have never seen before. Every drum

in Africa begins to play "goodbye"

inside our chests.

It looks around and sees us sobbing,

shakes its head, as if to say,

"There are no easy ways in and out of flame."

And in a wake of homeless letters and

now-faceless photographs, it lifts itself

and rises into its own name, rises into

a song we wrote

but never found

the way to sing out loud.

Acadia

We hike a green vein in the bicep of a landscape,

recently washed by rain. Stopping to rest against granite,

I wonder how long we would have to wait before

lichen attached themselves to our ankles, circulated our skin,

like ephemeral birthmarks of cloud on the

forehead of heaven.

This is the way Maine makes us lose the blue

rectangles marking the trail. With boulders like Vikings

pushing shields through the crust of earth. With

emerald beds of moss. With vistas that leap

into your throat and open it to wind.

At last, we have over-hiked ourselves, my lover's

pinkie-toes as tender as nerves in a mourner's chest.

The trail becomes suddenly interminable,

untrammeled. We are out of water, and the map

makes our destination seem three

mountain miles distant.

But we come to an unexpected crossroads

where the trails change. The new trail is flat

as a table’s back, a sandbar in a verdigris sea.

Blackberries float like buoys above lobster traps.

Our twin thirst drinks them, reaching fast

with four hands, until I find a tiny slug.

He has slurped all day on what, to us,

would be a single burst of flavor.

I imagine he is an Irish slug, an immigrant,

drinking away his sorrows, smoothing his

scars from the briars of love. The way he swoons

on the blackberry, it is obvious he is drunk.

I hand the wee fellow to my lover, and

his slithery eyes rise. I have never seen such wonder

on the visage of an insect. One glance at her is enough

to haunt him forever. I know exactly how he feels.

But forever is longer for a man than a slug.

How long does such an umber sliver live?

No longer than a season, since

winter would do him in. I see

his brief life laid out on the length of a leaf.

Her face like a lamp that never

abandons him, his final days spent

in reminiscence of this moment:

her eyes like two sepia suns

in the skin sky above him.

What else can he do on this

brief hike to oblivion, but drink

the sweet, black brew and

remember? Love-lost wanderer,

slimy prince of the briars, I

would do the same, slugging

around, daydreaming her face.

Field of wine, glimpse of goddess.

What more could you ask for?

Perhaps a warm log to sleep inside at night.

Or why not wish even bigger?

A man’s body, like my own,

To lay down beside her.

The Umbilicus Remains

This is Mother’s Day, on which we remember the patient eyes of the woman from which we sprang, the second one to hold us after the doctor wiped the meconium away. Despite the severance of modern medicine, the umbilicus remains. Our whole lives are afterbirth to this. She was there before we ever tasted air. Before the world, with clever talons, stripped our childhood wings away. Before the alphabet began. Before bayonets and bullets. Before braces and glasses-frames. Before we leapt into the soul’s expanding lake. Before two and two were four. Before darker, stranger forms of love began to call our names. A mother’s love extends beyond the grave.

To lose her someday will be to lose the cicada, but not its song. To lose the octopus, but not its arms. To lose the river but not the sense of wavelengths moving on. To lose a mother is to lose a shell and nothing more. She remains like a mountain. She lives in our pores. She is as omniscient as sky, as pervasive as our private star. To lose her someday will be to lose the rain but not its sound. To lose the bell but not the enormous gong. To lose her face but not her smile, like a Cheshire in the midst of our darkest times.

Mother is a synonym for sacrifice and an antonym for war. She would rather send her body than her boys. She would rather lose her life than watch us die. She would rather work a hundred jobs than watch us starve. She would rather bleed than watch us fall to ruin. Mother is the bravest word on Earth. It implies a fight to the death to preserve her offspring. If you doubt this, remember Grizzly bears when poachers touch their cubs. The word mother can mean warfare when her fireflies are lost. It can also means wisdom and laughter, confidence and chaos, femininity and fire. A mother will lay waste to everything that threatens the ones she pushed into the world. And what is a mother, but bones that chose the art of birth instead of dance? What is a mother, but words that were given to the womb instead of poetry? What is a mother, but a painter that chose the colors flesh and blood? What is a mother, but an author who chose to publish a novel whose chapters were filled with breathing and heartbeats? Her nights and days enslaved to the raising of a small and frightened beast. She traded her dreams so that ours could succeed. Her youth and aspirations were unlamented offerings. She gave until she had nothing left to give, then gave more.

A mother’s love can carry an elephant with one hand, can ride a bicycle without handle-bars. A mother’s love is never far. It hovers in the arches of old doorways. It clears a field where happiness can land. It helps a graceful lifespan manifest. A mother’s love has the energy of nuclear fission within its forearms. It is made of all elements, not just silver, bronze, and gold. It has no low tide or shallow end. A mother’s love builds a castle for her children, a home inside the heart’s impenetrable walls, then fills the moat of our memory with all the broken waters of her soul.

All Poems Copyright, Wolff Bowden 2006-2009

POEMS FROM ORPHANAGE OF IMAGINATION

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