You Are My Brother

YOU ARE MY BROTHER

I saw you dirty, sleeping in the street,

Your dry hide, carbon smudged ancient pottery,

Your fingernails, black as oil pooling in the driveway,

Your hair spiked like hawk feathers clumped by doormat mud.

I mistook you for an asphalt ball

Tumbling out of a truck,

Raked then rolled into the road,

Or dung of vegetarian animals, dark green

Sea urchin exploding needles, grass.

What stroke of misfortune befell you?

Has some broken gene uncoupled your logic?

Why are your glassy eyes transfixed by chimeras?

Did some personal tragedy tear your psyche into two?

No bread for a father,

No home for a mother,

No education for currency, unemployed,

Misfit piece in a manufacturing assembly line,

You wander about, a gyrating flywheel unconnected to a machine.

If I filled your cup with coins, I myself would go begging

Because your needs are a bottomless horn of empty.

Am I, Cain, being called to account for your destitution?

Am I, Dives, caressed by fine silk, thickened by choice meats?

I tell myself I will live simply,

Giving to you beyond the needs of my family,

Working to create a better society in which the poor

Are less destitute and the destitute are less.

See, my heart is a pocket fraying holes.

Tracked by an accusatory finger,

I want to look away but I cannot—

You are my brother.

Homeless Jesus (2013) by Timothy Schmalz

Semana Santa

SEMANA SANTA

The time of year when the world

Transforms into the inside of a tin can

Cooking in the noontime sun

Is when Jesus Christ is crucified

To astonishment of delirious crowds

Dropping in heat like dead insects

As reservoirs languish and asphalt streets,

Cracked, peeling, cry out for water.

Palm Sunday flutters weakly, a flag

Raising his arms in faint breeze.

You listen to the story of the Passion…

By the time Jesus is entombed,

You are wrung out and numb.

Days later, Maundy Thursday is mentholated,

Rising and setting in a wooded garden.

The reprieve is illusory.

Darkness shoves night inside an oven.

Soon you cannot escape Good Friday,

Twice hotter than the night before—

Turning round and round,

You are roasted on all sides,

Dripping as if broiling on a spit.

Two days’ provisions running low,

Holy Saturday finds you sitting peacefully

Beside a corpse for a companion

Inside a tomb pervaded by silence.

Comforted by cold, you imagine the sun

Without seeing the dawn.

You doze off the instant you wake up

To Easter Sunday suddenly present,

Pure, fresh water illumined by glory.

Inhaling a cloud, you glimpse the crystal city.

Originally published in The Galway Review (February 15, 2016)

The Crucifixion (1880) by Thomas Eakins

A Favorite Poem

Recently, I added to my file of favorite poems “Manunggul Jar” by Luisa A. Igloria, first published in Mud Season Review, Issue 16 (January 20, 2016). The poem recalls Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar.”

MANUNGGUL JAR

(Manunggul Cave, Palawan; late Neolithic)

Someone is loosing the rope

that tethered our boat

to the pier. Here we are, easing

forward into the fog, into the cold

that seems to have gotten colder.

We’ll pass the shuttered town,

we’ll slip into the currents

blue with the ink of unborn stars.

We’ll love them no less, no more,

even as the water swirls, changing

from jade to milk. The world we enter

then leave is round as the bowl of our

desires, and here the word for horizon

is the same as faithfulness: invisible

rudder our hands have always held,

even as now we cross our arms

across our chests, preparing

to travel farther, deeper.

Luisa A. Igloria

Manunggul burial jar

Two Bread Poems

Hot fresh bread…

Hot fresh bread, breakfast time:

Fragrant, not a flower,

Warming, not a fire,

Lively, not a flame,

Soothing, not a salve,

Kindly, not a caress;

Dark honey wheat,

Black oat barley,

Sweet cinnamon raisin,

Savory apple walnut,

Ciabatta, Foccacia, Pita,

Bublik, Chapati, Pandesal—

Parmesan, Romano—two-cheese,

Sunflower, sesame, fennel—three-seed,

Every type of loaf

Bundled in brown wrapper,

Crackling in your embrace,

Steaming scented clouds,

Breathe deeply

Atop a mountain;

Billowing, fluffy blanket,

Pull it up,

Tuck it snug

Beneath your chin;

Bracing, poppy fireside,

Cross your arms,

Hold it to your heart.

Fed in deepest winter,

Bathed at height of summer,

Refreshed when day is dry,

Sheltered when life is wet,

Healed when you are pierced,

Becalmed…even after you are violently shaken,

Remade in hope,

Transformed in joy,

Nourished, uplifted…blessed:

Every good thing comes to you

As a loaf of bread.

Let us bake bread…

Let us bake bread today.

Let us labor, let us stir

Wheat flour, honey, butter,

Add salt and warm water,

Leaven—waken yeast,

Breathing now,

Mold it all in one elastic ball,

Polish it with olive oil,

Wrap it,

And wait.

Wait for what?

Don’t ask questions.

Just wait.

It rises:

Promise of surety,

Plume of hope.

Knead the dough, roll it flat,

Fold it thick and thicker,

Push it down using

Heels of your palms.

The best part is

Dough smiles

At becoming

A new creation.

Pressing together,

You, the dough, are one.

More olive oil, wrap again,

Wait again.

Hours.

It rises.

Stoke the oven, shove it in.

Rising some more,

Freshly scented, golden brown,

Dawn has come to the door.

Day raps on the plate.

Napkins fold greetings.

Break off a piece,

Eat.

 

Golden wheat stalks

Sonnet

SONNET

I have never written a sonnet, and I never would,

But for the memory of our love I will write one to remember.

You are eternal summer—lovely, temperate, good—

I will love you countless ways, and after death, better.

I love you close, as your hand on my chest is my hand,

Or as your eyes, the sweet moment I fall asleep, close.

I love you white, as a desert of pure, relentless sand,

Or green, as the mountain heights of fresh water flows.

You are the bursting hope of dawn, dusk in luminous desire.

You are the abounding body of a river, rain falling to console.

You are Shakespeare’s immortal fancy, Barrett Browning’s fire,

Neruda’s darkling secret between the shadow and the soul.

Forswear my foolish oath—it is folly to say never!

Our sonnet and our love will now abide forever.

Winner, Carillon Magazine Sonnets for Charity Competition 2015

Originally published in TWJ Magazine (May 1, 2015)

I have never written a sonnet...

Reflecting on your tranquil life…

Reflecting on your tranquil life…

Reflecting on your tranquil life, I gaze at you in repose, your eyes pearls shaken loose from treetops, silvered.

Rain pelts our roof with pebbles as you drift into sleep, river brushwood rubbing shoulders with land.

Rising and falling, a cloud bumping over a mountain, your white arms. Turning, you exhale deeply. Mist gently pushes back your hair.

Wild brushstrokes of pillows and linens tumble as children, their laughter, bolts of silk, shimmying.

Gazebo freshly planted, you wind your legs and arms about a trellis.

Let us be orchids who widen our filigreed faces, leaves tapering to wax points proffering greetings.

Nodding plants in a circle, we will dine with April as our guest, grasping his warm hands from the vows of dawn until the crown of dusk.

Originally published in The Furious Gazelle (April 28, 2015)

Wild brushstrokes of pillows and linens...

Four Desert Poems

THE DESERT

It was the Lord, our God, who brought us and our ancestors up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.—Joshua 24:17

You depart for the desert in darkness,

The way lit by the moon.

Rocks and scrub touched by chalk,

Brush lightly dusted white…

The planet is luminously radioactive.

Mountains cut out by scissors

Press black polygons against the sky.

Gradually, gloaming

Restores pink flush to the land,

Turning the moon into a faint watermark.

Noontime unsheathes his sword,

Slaying the day.

No animals peep in this slow broil,

Not a twitch of the ear,

Not a blink from a paralytic.

Traveling inside an oven, you wear a hat,

Swig ice water frozen the day before,

Keep delirium at bay like an anxious patient.

The wind lies in a coma.

Oxygen is too weak to rise.

Twilight is adding pigments to oil,

Deepening blue,

Doing arithmetic,

Red times orange.

Tiny denizens stir as if readying for school.

Dusk makes a promise:

He says the mountains hold deep wells and caves,

Cool as beds freshly made.

He speaks not to deceive but to encourage.

Waiting is a long walk to freedom, a motionless journey.

The world is…

The world is a waterless white expanse.

Abandoned cities stand as termite mounds,

Hubs of gulley networks lined with salt.

Beetles make homes where no humans roam.

Scorpions tiptoeing track tiny dimples.

Lizards scurry about as if electrocuted.

The wind whistles through honeycomb ruins.

Tiny tornadoes raise their fists.

Hot dust puffs like gun smoke.

We walk among windswept dunes of ash.

We quarry for light and dig for springs.

We tap at stones and ask for mercy.

We water ourselves to water the world.

ELIJAH

I am struck down by the warrior sun in the desert.

I am a string attempting to stand.

I cannot move my legs—

They are stones hammered into the earth.

I cannot lift my arms—

They are branches felled by a storm.

I am a house unable to move,

A hoary salt bed cooked entirely dry.

Depletion is my abrupt affliction.

I am a well filled at bottom with sand.

I long for a jug of sweet water,

For a bundle of fresh steaming bread

To bring life to my legs, hope to my heart—

Who will bring me wherewithal for my journey?

The ocean is a desert…

The ocean is a desert:

No water to drink,

No trees to rest,

No animals to ride.

The gull that glides

Above the waves

Is the faraway condor

Surveying the sand;

They are in their element.

We find no home

In the sea any more than
We sleep in the clouds.

Desert sunset at Kings Creek Station, Northern Territory, Australia