Nor as they don’t appear to be.”

– Frida Kahlo

I create you to give you

color so you can paint -

paint us, an idea of us

more detailed

than our locked reality

I am the artery

You are the earth

The stink as arteries

thorn into earth

And I make it so –

I make it so accessible

A nip, a snip

Tissue of rock

Spiney teeth

Toothless spine

The love of my body

beating away –

miscarrying its way to you

Its seed bearing

sweetspot – overlapping spirals -

The resin runs round me

as it runs

out

Cephalonian crag -

Caked with olive trees,

gray green leaves,

small pale lobes,

her hidden place.

She slides in, bit by bit.

First a toe, an arm, a leg,

under a leg, an ear -

away from village tongues,

their knots, their spit,

this cruelty of closeness.

*

And the land becomes a map,

geology the way in

geography a way out,

as she bakes

into the island soil,

into the limestone

piked and chewed

for olive pressing/ olive

dancing.

*

Tomorrow, the oil

will slowly rise,

to cover the bread,

anoint the sick,

to fill the lamp

and float the cork,

and as the cotton burns

and the fire goes out,

seven priests will whisper vespers,

and line a glassy cross on all the palms,

and all the heads, the cheeks, the chin

of the bowed and begging women.

In a poem, the danger is obvious; there is natural idiom and then there is domesticated language. The difference is apparent immediately when you sense everything has been subjugated, that the poet has tamed the language and the thought process that flows into a poem until it maintains a principle of order but nothing remains to give the poem its tang, its liberty, its force. Once the poem starts flowing, the poet must not try to dictate every syllable.”

–Stanley Kunitz

The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden

I make this picture -

oil on metal – flat in bed,

grieving galleries of paint

over bedcloth and bandage.

Pelvis and rib, trolley and column,

dwarfed into a child’s hand,

saying take it – take me.

“I hope the leaving is joyful,”

so Mexican samurais say.

“I hope never to return,”

so I say – a lover’s leap.

We make progress through violence,

the you, the me, the you,

And I will make myself illegible.

But your breast-feeding mouth

runs over me, flowering roots.

“I hope the leaving is joyful, I hope never to return” – Frida Kahlo’s last diary entry.

Greek goes blaow

In her mouth, each syllable

Linking up to the next,

A constant constriction.

And she feels like some crazed

Rattle snake making too much

Noise, as she twists between

The vowels that unroll

Tales of modern Greek

Arrogance, pouring some thick

Ugliness onto those fossilized

Ancients. glistening behind

The heritage they wrapped

In doric slabs.

Greek lexis – words that

Go blaow by Church decree,

That rope the women, the

Naturalized, the experimental in,

That send words and all of

These voices to xenitia.

Quiet your rattle or pedal

Your thoughts away. So she

Swings into some new glossa,

Making space between the vowels.

Greeks are hard-packed in America too -

They seem to be lost in the fist

That they were found – in old ways

That have new needs.

Her rattle, her poems – mouthful of

Fight and roses striving

To touch what matters – slaps into

The Greek peninsula, into

The liars, the stubbornness.

They were afraid,

And she was asked to go back,

And it was not simple,

Blocking the way.

lexis: words

xenitia: absence or departure from home accompanied with a sense of sadness; estrangement

glossa: language

“Why do you care about me?” I said.

And you said, “The comfort.”

“We sit. I guess, in a good place,” I mumbled back.

BOY 2

No, it was not like that. You remember fragments.

I was not like that.

BOY 1

I had a strange dream the other night.

It took place in my kitchen at home.

A lion came to visit. I waited

to hear each paw fall

as he swept across the floor.

His presence was comforting.

He came to talk.

Even the strike of his paws

on the kitchen tile had a soothing thump.

He called me near and put a paw

in my hands. His ripe eyes

Made me think of blankets and caves.

As we sat together, he breathed

into my ear, “Kiss me before I forget you.”

And we did. We kissed. And I asked the lion to stay with me.

And he said, “I cannot stay with you. I am not tamed.”

BOY 2

No, it was not like that. He said he cannot stay with you.

He said “You are not tamed.”

No, no it was your mother.

You said, “I am a digger.”

She said, “You are a forgetter.”

BOY 1

“Do you remember cutting my hair?”

“Do you remember?” “Do you?”

“Do you remember anything at all?”

BOY 2

No it was not like that.

I do not remember if it was your head.

No, it was not like that.

You said, “Hands are strange.”

We’re closing up. Newborn fists.

BOY 1

You are right. I remember now.

I said, “Please comfort me.”

And then I said, “Why do you care about us?”

BOY 2

Because we’re dying of thirst.

We could not make sense of it.

And everything is quickening, quicker, quick.

And I remember our absence.

Grieving galleries of paint

Over bedcloth and bandage

That dwarf me into a child’s hand –

Saying take it – take me

“I hope the leaving is joyful

I hope never to return”

So mexican samurais say

So I say – a lover’s leap

My hours like restored villages

Praying to recede into foot of mountain

Under the soot of your hungriest politic

And your breast feeding mouth

Runs over me, flowering roots

When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own image.
–Meister Eckhart

Bristle bricks paint onto canvas

Stretched for days, miles

Thinning me out –

And everywhere you look

Each one will be

Of me until I grind

Out of you empathy

Carve out of you my heartbeat

Center it into each three-dimensional scene

Diorama of the third wife leavening bread

A persuasive survival born after you left

A perfectly pricked pear

See me from a distance

I will transmit and omit light

Countering images of limbs

Lust and lovers dynamited

Into constellations of ghosts to come

“The roses had the look of flowers that are looked at.”

—T.S. Eliot

I

Snow falls in Greece

The weather has changed

It never used to

And you grunt at the inconvenience

As you stand day after day, branched

Into your corner of the village

Shaking your brown sweaty hat

And mythically await

Years later, finally

I lean into you like an opening door

Your bear paws mean happiness to me

As we mutate into where we last left off

This, this, I understand this to be love

An epic handprint of you, me, us

And everyone else before

II

And the ritual

Inhales us

III

Hand in hand, you take me to grandma’s grave

Like you always do and tell me again

How you’ve been without her for forty-eight years

“That’s a whole lot of missing to be had”

And how every day, try as you might

You remember her in pieces

Never the whole face

Eyes that lazied over you like light

A smile that covered itself up in laughter

A jaw tamped with strength

I watch you

Watch my shapes

Looking for pieces

That might

Knit her up into a face

IV

Back at the house

You won’t go in

And you tell me how now

You sleep in storage

There is no room in empty rooms

Time doesn’t pass

The walls are scratched with lives

“And I can’t see myself in here”

Each room crowded with gaps

Growing pains, unfillable blanks

Father and brother disappeared at sea

Both sisters having gone to see

“The house died,” you say

“The house died  unwitnessed

I couldn’t keep it alive all this time

Waiting for each of you to come

And it breaks my heart

So much time has slipped us on and changed us

That you fed back to this house, only once in a while”

V

Tipping your snow covered hat, you wave me off

And I remember you in pieces

Never the whole face

Sweet stained smile

Nose like a broken fence

Smudged glasses that made it so

Hard for me to see your eyes

As you stood outside your story

With no one to listen

Spelling out the names

Of those disappearing faces

VI

Still I see your shape on that corner of the village

Beneath the house you built

In between hoofed light and rocks

Knocked down by war and earthquake

Rebuilt stone by stone over loss

Over and over again

Not knowing who you would outlive

And how you would live all those years ahead

As five children come and go

With nine grandchildren who rarely come

And many great grandchildren yet to come

With your greatest dream behind you

VII

And in this last hour

Your life throws itself

Wrestling you down like a root

As it backs into you

Like a dream going south

You will surprise yourself

It will take all your breath

And it will all go away

VIII

What is the good in good bye

How do you speak dead language

And you turn to your side now

And you go to sleep

Life ends in a face

And I needed you

Dearly beloved

I stole from you many times

I robbed you

Only in the end

To get robbed

I have learned something

At my own cost

I gave you many different names

In many different bodies

That ran off the page

And filled the room

For years I can’t

Take back and I stand

Over it all

Counting up what I lost

I shared myself around

And I grew afraid of them

I never gave enough

I was afraid to be too simple

So I burned you and me

And us

And then wondered how

And when my words meant nothing

I undid yours

Rotting

“Dear dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went

on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night. Let me think:

was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost remember

feeling a little different.”

—Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland