No Ordinary Place (4 page)

 
for Cherrie

The spoon he lifts to her lips

holds a sun, the soup

I made from memory.

Around the table as we eat,

our arms touch.

We hold her in this net.

She is waiting to climb

into earth

where her room waits,

where the clocks are set

to a different hour,

and many are called,

and many chosen.

She will rise and climb

into the sky,

become a sparrow

with sorrow in her beak,

she will be lamp and shadow

in our empty houses,

will lie down

in the loneliness of stars.

We will search the night for her,

our faces shining, bewildered moons.

The child begs for the same story

night after night. She waits

beneath the white-starched sheet

in her bed beside the window, full open

 
to the caught air,

unstirred leaves of the mimosa.

She pulls the sheet to her face,

 
sniffs its clean,

and waits for her mother to come,

open the book, and begin.

Beneath the telling, her mother’s voice,

the child wonders why

the old woman cut the tongue

 
of the sparrow

fluttering among the bamboo,

and so in her days, the child

 
sings for the bird.

She sings to the old woman

and believes the magic in her singing

will turn the old woman

 
gentle and sane.

 
She sings

after her mother closes the book

and rises without kiss or touch

and descends the stairs

 
of her madness.

The child cups her hands,

breathes onto the sparrow

 
and holds it to her chest

when the mother’s rage

sends her hiding under the bed,

into the night of the closet,

 
or high in the downy

blossoms of the mimosa,

and the little common bird

quickens its breath

until calmed in the curl of her fingers.

Always she vows

 
to protect the bird.

She strokes the timid head,

feels the heat of its sides

 
on her cheek

and sings, believing

that the song, if sung perfectly

over many days and nights,

 
will lift her mother

from the black room of her mind,

will lead her into light.

 
The child grew old

watching her parents remake the world.

They looked into her eyes and told her

what she saw did not happen,

as though in a moment the moon

 
turned its back,

leaves clambered up from the dirt

and locked themselves to the tree,

as though petals scattered by night’s rain

 
retook their places as the rose.

All the things that did not happen

collected in the dark place

 
beneath her bed

and entered her dreams as she slept.

Someone calling and calling,

her father, alone in a village far away,

whose name she counted

on the fingers of her small hands,

whose heart she held in the cup

 
of her small heart,

the father who whispered like wind

among the silken blossoms

of the mimosa,
The journey, child,

will be long
.

Beyond hills, and shadow,

on the other side of the rain,

girl who tumbled

 
from God’s coat pockets

into their hands, their need, the barren

ground of their love,

 
I promise you

this journey will be long,

your true home another country

between morning and despair,

 
between trespass and grace.

Child, speak your truth.

 
There is no night

that you were not first born into.

 
There is no sky

that is not already inside you.

I lay down at night and wakened

to the darkening of the world.

Beneath a sky of slate I chant

the liturgy of autumn, light

grown weary after its toil

of ripening, coaxing

 
the myriad blossoms open,

the wheat to turn to gold.

I read the gospel according to trees.

It says:
Give away

 
all that you have,

make yourself destitute, bereft,

but first you must become as fire
.

This is the first lesson.

From childhood I learned

the proverbs of rain

and of her sister, grief,

the frail pages stiffened

 
from weather:

Grief can drown you.

Rain returns all things to earth
.

This is the second lesson.

Once there was a child,

someone’s daughter.

She folded her grief

 
into paper boats,

sent them out on the water.

She folded her tears

 
into paper birds

and let them fly from her hands

into the rain-dark sky.

The birds had eaten the path

 
to her lost father.

She left bits of bread wherever she walked,

that he might come.

She held the last crust in her fist,

and when she slept she tucked her fist

 
beneath her pillow.

She named him Wind. Starry Night.

She named him Rain on Parched Ground.

She prayed a small girl’s prayer.

She made him into light, a candle

that flickered and made shadows of itself,

and she recited the parable

 
of light:

There was once a love made manifest

in a crust of bread

crushed in a child’s fist.

 
Eat, child, eat,

that you become as flame
.

I lie down at night and name the darkness.

You didn’t know, my Father, you didn’t know

 
the years of my hunger.

My fingers curled around you.

I held you under my pillow

near the compass of my heart,

north star of my longing.

So much I keep there still:

the frayed scarf of your voice,

the curious little birds of your eyes,

mountains, rivers, the creased

 
and faded map

I didn’t know I carried.

I lie down and hear the wind

sing its hymn to the dying light,

unlock the leaf from the tree,

fray the tattered cloth of the sky.

Give away all that you have
, it sings.

Take your grief into your hands,

bless it, plant it in the earth.

And there will come a living thing, born

 
of soil, and rain.

It will bud and blossom
.

This, the final lesson:

the parable of the astonished heart.

This hummingbird

will not die again;

your careful hands

have made him as though alive,

and all the birds come

to pay him homage.

You have placed him

in the hand of the Xian warrior

who is finished now, with battle

and spends his days

listening for wind’s song

in the great bell

of the sky,

and keeps watch over his garden,

noting the changing face

of the moon, intimate

with her darker

and lighter moods.

He has grown gentle, this warrior,

and the bird, not afraid at all,

waits, quiet in his fist

so that the throat, colour of claret,

catches the afternoon light.

Like the last blossom of autumn,

this smallest of birds

has wakened his heart.

And God stirs,

always,

in the waking heart.

1.
Where Are You, O Mother?

I suffer apparitions. Ecstasy.

Endless centuries

of grief.

Day and night

the lion moon

circles, finding nothing

to eat.

2.
Incomprehensible and without Beginning

My cities of memory.

Mysterious astronomy

of the rose.

Compass

of the universe.

3.
Trisagion

I am the crumbed table

on which the dishes

have yet not been cleared.

I thirst as the mouths

of leaves.

Wolf hunger

of the newly born

is mine.

4.
Celebration

Geraniums in bloom

on the balconies

of Buenos Aires.

Mediterranean blue

seen from the caves

of Patmos.

Vincent’s weeping yellows.

5.
Four Elements

Scarlet: Picasso’s Guernica.

Blue: Saskatchewan flax.

Gold: The hair of the sun.

Purple: Sky behind the racing moon.

6.
Joyous Light

Always, somewhere, the sun

is a burnt sienna.

Chants of the desert monks

in the earliest hours of dawn.

The rattlesnake praying,

curled on ancient stone.

7.
My Heart Trembles

A nomad, I walk

the shifting dunes

of Tamagesh.

Caravans pass. What loneliness —

their moaning wheels,

their belled herds.

The famine wind

flees through the trembling

doors of houses and of windows

frozen in their depressions.

The dead, underground, breathing.

8.
Have Mercy upon Us

The chained and unchained.

Factory workers. Skin

on bone.

Those who must drink mud.

Cellists, poets,

and the architects of mourning.

9.
Therein Remember

Those who have fallen

asleep. Saturn.

Jupiter.

Dear little Pluto, who has never

awakened.

How far to the end

of the universe.

What lies beyond.

10.
Nurtured in Love

St. Gregory’s fowl. Its feelings

toward the dove.

The dog who nurtured

a fawn, made a sacred space

on its bed.

How children in the streets

of Luanda, Saõ Paulo, Chicago

break a cracker into equal portions.

11.
Woe Is Me

If only I could die

for you.

12.
Be Delighted

The cicada’s anthem.

Women carrying fruit on their heads.

The slow undress of autumn.