Grounding
All night I slept
against his shoulder as they held us
stalled on a runway, powering the plane down
system by system. Restlessness is woven
into the body, vein by vein,
but even at thirty thousand feet
blood can clot and dam--thrombosis a bullet forged
from too much stillness, a small bird flying
hard against glass. All night passengers paced
the narrow aisle, shaking their legs to stave off flowering
into the lung a rosette of blood less slipknot
than stone, more those rose rocks
my parents gathered a half-century ago
from erosion, a crumbling sandstone wing
studded with iron-stained crystals
beneath the city where they’d met
years before a flawed diamond was tongued
into its knobby gold set, before the affairs, the eventual
inevitable break. Two hundred fifty
million years ago, seawater filled
that void. Beneath the skin, earth
is such emptiness, limestone’s brittle lace fragile
as a sparrow’s vial of bones. By morning
we’d mutinied, abandoned that broken plane
for a city I’d known only as a small
window of night, a bracelet of white lights
dissolved now by dawn. In the terminal, the man I
thought I loved told me
what to eat and when, what to say to whom
in which particular country. I was watching for wings
to silver the glass, for all the science I never could grasp
to radio in clear. How crickets
can hear with their legs. How space is really
the smallest unit of matter, and air
just another ocean, you can ride
out its currents. How the earth keeps giving up
crystals petalled in soft grit that nevertheless
outlast history, while a seagull swept into an engine
can bring a jet down. At the gate, he slept with his arms
wrapping his body. I was reading Saturn’s rings aren’t made
of light, but of snared moons ground to bands
of shimmering dust. That summer, retracing my parents’
younger lives, I drove past the red-stone mental hospital
where they’d worked, through what used to be
countryside, good rock hunting, now a clutter
of suburban yards, bricked fences.
What I learned from my father: it’s stasis
that kills, and face cards are always
the ones to keep. From my mother: self is just
what doesn’t leave you. What I taught myself
between flights, to orbit any celestial stone is to lose
everything but direction.
On the margin of a neighborhood
going up, the only roses I unearthed were failed
partial blooms: one side ridged, the other
smooth as an Amish doll’s face
the maker leaves unfeatured
to avoid sin, the graven image. As if God didn’t know
to go any deeper.
From Biogeography (Tupelo 2008). First published in Agni.
All night I slept
against his shoulder as they held us
stalled on a runway, powering the plane down
system by system. Restlessness is woven
into the body, vein by vein,
but even at thirty thousand feet
blood can clot and dam--thrombosis a bullet forged
from too much stillness, a small bird flying
hard against glass. All night passengers paced
the narrow aisle, shaking their legs to stave off flowering
into the lung a rosette of blood less slipknot
than stone, more those rose rocks
my parents gathered a half-century ago
from erosion, a crumbling sandstone wing
studded with iron-stained crystals
beneath the city where they’d met
years before a flawed diamond was tongued
into its knobby gold set, before the affairs, the eventual
inevitable break. Two hundred fifty
million years ago, seawater filled
that void. Beneath the skin, earth
is such emptiness, limestone’s brittle lace fragile
as a sparrow’s vial of bones. By morning
we’d mutinied, abandoned that broken plane
for a city I’d known only as a small
window of night, a bracelet of white lights
dissolved now by dawn. In the terminal, the man I
thought I loved told me
what to eat and when, what to say to whom
in which particular country. I was watching for wings
to silver the glass, for all the science I never could grasp
to radio in clear. How crickets
can hear with their legs. How space is really
the smallest unit of matter, and air
just another ocean, you can ride
out its currents. How the earth keeps giving up
crystals petalled in soft grit that nevertheless
outlast history, while a seagull swept into an engine
can bring a jet down. At the gate, he slept with his arms
wrapping his body. I was reading Saturn’s rings aren’t made
of light, but of snared moons ground to bands
of shimmering dust. That summer, retracing my parents’
younger lives, I drove past the red-stone mental hospital
where they’d worked, through what used to be
countryside, good rock hunting, now a clutter
of suburban yards, bricked fences.
What I learned from my father: it’s stasis
that kills, and face cards are always
the ones to keep. From my mother: self is just
what doesn’t leave you. What I taught myself
between flights, to orbit any celestial stone is to lose
everything but direction.
On the margin of a neighborhood
going up, the only roses I unearthed were failed
partial blooms: one side ridged, the other
smooth as an Amish doll’s face
the maker leaves unfeatured
to avoid sin, the graven image. As if God didn’t know
to go any deeper.
From Biogeography (Tupelo 2008). First published in Agni.