No, really, they're about dirt. An ecologist and poet friend of mine wrote about soil and its connection to her soul-- how interchangeable these words are to her-- as if they are the same. This led me to go digging into my own soil for poems I had written that feel ready to shoot up.
Soma in Darkness
Why doesn't darkness cover me like pitch?
Why does it feel more clear and bright
than most luminous things around me?
A lampshade, a glass vase of island flowers,
a hovering fish in a bowl--left behind by my daughter--
all alit on my desk by the window for a time.
These glow in the slant of afternoon,
yet they become obscure
as the night grows more crystalline.
My heart beats more sure of itself
as dusky atoms hint at the hidden.
The dark is less suspect in its muffled alibis
than all of the claims each daybreak
has laid upon me.
Yesterday, the fish perished an ignoble death,
gruesome in the way small fish sicken and die,
but not before I tried to euthanize it
in a misguided fashion with
sodium bicarbonate and vodka.
The passing was a struggle
and not the promised instantaneous and painless.
Promises like the bubbles he often blew--
as a proud Siamese Fighting Fish does--
gathering one after another before they pop,
waiting for a female to drift by, to trap her eggs.
Even while he lived alone and trapped,
menaced by his own reflection,
still he functioned and formed his beaded nests,
instinct driving harder than hope.
The bowl, water, meal worms, medicine,
all are gone now.
A week ago, he was fanning out
in his red and blue fineness,
sure of his purpose in nomine patris,
but yesterday he was diminished
to a gray charcoal, muted, gasping.
I plucked one of the wilting flowers
out of the witnessing vase, a faded coral lily,
the one he'd have stared and gaped at.
After one scoop, I lay him under a tree,
and left the silent bloom,
given a new life as proffered gift--
inspired by guilt, perhaps, as flowers often are--
from gracious home decor to memento mori.
His existence on my desk was a fact,
as is his disintegration,
as is the now drooping bouquet.
I cannot count on these--
and much less on my antique typewriter,
also a gift, iron in its stance
and older than myself-- to be more real
than this disquiet mind
that solidifies its knowledge
and intent from firmament into a fist
that cannot hasten death any more than
it can prevent it in this room
of the easily identifiable.
The fish is free to lie in the earth,
the flower caresses it, while I
somehow manage to walk away from them,
feet not quite in shoes, shoes not quite on grass.
I glide above it all, rarefied in an exquisite beam
that knows its own painful brightness.
This light wants to dazzle me away
from loamy dampness,
tempting me to look at a sungod in full glory,
only to be singed ashen, or salted and pilloried.
In living, I must insist that my presence here is
stamped, no longer invalid with each independent step.
I would rather know how
can I descend to the darkness
which is my heart's desire
to join them, fish and flower.
Lying down and covering myself
with dirt and bark is the same as
settling on my desk at night
under its face-down papers,
barely aware of the glistenings of day
that keep me wilting and gasping.
I want to turn away, not from life, but deeper into it,
curling into its very mouth,
as it rolls me over its tongue, and decides.
-- lb 2011
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| Water Lily by Alice Pike Barney, 1900 |
Love Puts Us in the Ground
Transcendence is for the birds.
The sky is their home away
from all homes, all rooted loves.
If you want love always
then trade in your wings
for a spade and a hindrance of earth,
If you want a home forever,
roof it over out of the sun,
stuff and furnish
until you shoulder
it up like Atlas
with each passing year
If you want beauty
to never leave your skin
or your side
tend to the birds
who perch in a line
along this roof
but you will be left behind
in their perfected launch
Love puts us in the ground,
sets us back on our heels,
back down to earth
to feel the grass between
our fingers,
the moss beneath us,
ashen mud and beetles.
Love puts us deep in it.
There are no lofty heights
without soil, no clouds
without leaves fallen and
clinging to our wet limbs.
A snail knows this well
as it is caught up in the beak
Only when the leaves, grass, moss
are dried out, can the wind
whistle through us.
Until then, we cling, we let go, we grasp, we release.
As it should be.
So says the frog who
tongue-snaps and leaps,
and the snake
who coils and sheds.
But make no mistake,
do not be misled:
Love will not lift up,
will not find you a celestial nest.
Love will not hoist you, me, anyone
to relentless bliss above the rest.
So says I of mean estate,
The Law of Love puts us in the ground
And to it we run.
-- lb 2011
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