You came over for dinner because the piano was without keys,
worried its presence was infecting, said it echoed
somber tones that lingered like braided rivers
leaving your belly full of hymns. Food sings
of silent energy contained and notes taste
like bread, like water, they speak
to the disconnect between heart and mind,
a sheet music engulfed by the wreck.
So much depends on the handling.
Things respond to the touch, finger on key.
You blame it on me for offsetting the metronome,
the lost meaning of natural and
accidental, the difference between white and black.
The fray of your fingers on piano conjures
a cadence. The syncopation of marking –
measure by measure, brief segments of time
assigned by God. In the geography of a hand offered
as if it were the last gesture
in the world, the keyless piano questions:
how to make its existence on earth more sounding.
Sometimes just living threatens to break a body.
The piano knows what is necessary to spill centuries
and that is why you took it apart key by key,
failed attempts at extending your range.
Entering the Age of Doubt [Should the Unexpected Occur]
what do we make of a world obsessed with trying
to take and transform, until what is natural becomes unnatural.
Who would believe the earth‘s tears would gather in salty whirlpools
gravitating towards each other’s weight or that an Age of
Doubt came from wanting. Too much wishing upon stars shaken into silence
When, the unlikely occurs: the earth splits herself open from the inside
birds fall from skies a presage to the Age of Silence where intoxicated glaciers
stealth slowly, radiating across the land in unforgiving rivers,
the troubled waters that eventually cover up our names.
I. You’ll like, the ones you’ll want
I’m thinking of you
how can you write
write about Billy
who writes? About the names,
the breaks at dinner, oh
how they'll always be
political, the words, simply
because they spring out of my body
like moths, the dismantling of wings
II. How you play with Language
have the thing mean the thing
mean the thing. But the thing is
our languages are
dead have died
are dying -
and maybe if I were to
III. Write about it. Turn in
a blank page with the title “A Poem Once Spoken
in Shoshone By A Woman Who No Longer Speaks
Her Language”
you'd see. A poem
that shows
how daunting
the white space is
IV. You’d see a woman, lost or broken
holding herself in a hallway,
the dirt-ridden floors of her former boarding
schools, where they taught make it new, make it
new. Words taught
by a man who wanted us to be
modern. Maybe it was too difficult
to be real or the reality was too
difficult trying to find yourself
IV. How to be American in America,
questioning what it means
to dream and at the same time defer
to the appropriation of language
V. This is where I tell you
I’m envious. You can write a poem
about love, how you went to Paris
or write about home, cowboys and Indians.
You are not burdened by your body.
If I were to write about home,
you wouldn’t know where it is.
I’m no longer thinking of poems, but people
the way mine are dead, how they died, how
we are and are not dying.
