Geshe-la Speaks of Sky Burial

[T]here are six realms of existence in which all deluded beings exist…. Although the realms appear to be distinct and solid, as our world seems to us, they are actually dreamy and insubstantial. They interpenetrate one another and we are connected to each.”
~Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

To find a human corpse while walking is good luck,
he smiled. I laughed, recalling morbid photos of
a tundra where a shriveled face and arms were sucked
quite clean and red by vultures’ final act of love.

I didn’t ask him, Why good luck? It just made sense,
despite the fact that here such luck would make a man
grow pale and cry, or call the law. We don’t dispense
our bones this way. We box them for the promised land.

One friend surmised the luck is in the end of life’s
great suffering. But I say luck is witnessing
that body as myself. No longer someone’s wife
or child or love—a dissipating fleshy dream.

With any luck what’s left of me will be this eye.
Bequeath me to the buzzards. Bury me in sky.

2013
With thanks to Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen,
Padma Thornlyre and Julie Cummings

Swallowed

A man and woman walk from room to room for art.
Her books stand on their toes to greet him, open
In his thoughtful palms, spark de Beauvoir, Sartre.

So much room. They fill it, take on the shape
Of ceilings curved edgeless into walls,
The vaulted sloping stair. He stops to frame

Her in his gaze before the yellow earth
And red blaze of a large painting. She slips shy
Into dark eyes, the white gap of words.

A bedroom swallows poems and clothes.
Persona finally flesh, he mines her ragged song.
Trembling verbs are always last to go.

Contrast somersaults and dials wanton,
Plunging through itself the vigor
Of a hungry woman turning a giant swan.

Gods make secret salts on a lost, stone beach
And scry. Pleasure crumples faces into crashing brine,
Slides froth on tides of shapeless poetry.

Sucking every sea-crossed tragedy from the other’s lips,
They swallow the waste of history, and the sweetest
Peacock poison fans iridescent from matched hips.

2013

In The Nervous Breakdown

The Nervous Breakdown recently featured my poem, "Waking into Sleep, Take Your Waking Slow," as well as a self-interview.

The above links are now defunct (as of late 2024), so I’m glad I recently republished the interview here on Wordweeds. You can read it here.

Strange Matter

The song sung in the inch
of ion breath between our lips—
a plasma sea whose waves
are not contained

by small dark cars
or hand-smudged walls,
the widest desert plain.
We do not sink

to lowest places.
Gravity is no master here.
What shape can hold
our spreading body?

Fashion hands
of words and paint
and still our gyres ooze.
Strange outstretched sun,

fine filaments,
these magnet arms
conduct the infinite.
We let it move.

2013

Moiré

Unmoored as you depart, my waves
Whirl out a pulsing mesh, patterned

On your groove, your angled form, hips
A turning beacon for your hands

Wringing me. I eddy and swirl
Sweet for your return. Juiced curves

Your honeyed gaze has wrought draw flies.
One looms and dives on what we’ve caught

With our own bare hands, not hers.
Despite professed noble intent

And invitation’s compliment,
Her quick net was only ever full

Of giant holes the shape of your eyes,
Your mouth my rushing current.

2013

Puja Tilaka

I ask this conflagration
to reduce me.
How long must I burn
with flowers?
Wind dashes my hands
across parking lots
and streets; hips settle
on lawns and rooftops
a fine grey ash,
and still I wish
to smear my mouth
upon your brow.

2012

Night Walk with Strings

Cause what is simple in the moonlight by the morning never is.
~Conor Oberst, “Lua”

A bare cornfield in Illinois takes your footprints.
Walking toward the unlit woods, seeds
fall in with the family of names you drop. Only a radio
tower’s three red lights witness your strange fruit.
Say one name three times and be surprised
when the train woos. Don’t ask why.

Just walk stinging to the edge of the field. Run
for heat. It takes what seems a long time. Think eyes.
The grassy edge drops low. The woods are only a string
of trees along a road. A sprawling tree creaks.
Straddle a white fallen log. Call ahhhh.
Call and call until the moon shines sharp wind.

No mountains, you don’t know which direction
you face. Relative to what. The direction is want.
For long moments, there are no names.
Tall waving weeds are not people walking
or weeds. You are not a person but a wind,
low sky, cold and creak. No one knows.

When you are done with nothing, a fox
doesn’t run by. Visit the soft moon through
the talking tree. Think of sitting in tall grass,
of what this might do to you. Don’t sit.
Climb back up to the field and walk with the wind
behind. Moving toward light goes faster.

Think better of doing magic for what you want.
Don’t plant the clean orange panties you found
tangled in the fray of your clean orange scarf
when you first stepped out the door, tired of walls
and warmth. Nothing will grow from them
in this field under the moon. One never knows

which you is casting the spell. Better to let
the huge field walk across you. Fallow. Love’s pale
stalks and cobs plowed under. Crunch with cold.
Bite with wind. Spread rich space over earth. Wait.
Gloveless, pull out a pocket-sized notebook and write
careless rows in the light of a nearby neighborhood.

Nearer and nearer your mother’s home, notice
your scarf soaked with breath. Touch your water.
Sing your song of want. Dance drunk with cold,
clumsy with clods. Sink into crusted, soft furrows.
Find the old wagon wheel leaning on the oak
where you first left the manicured yards.

Trespass, breach the stand of grabby trees
where Shadow’s name is engraved on a river
rock. Pay respect to every dog you’ve ever lost.
Hold on to your hat. Walk the paved road back
to the house with burning thighs, a fist of panties
in your pocket, smelling of Christmas night.

2012

Urge and Urge and Urge,Always the Procreant Urge of the World

Countless khandros navigate my seaward
hands. I reach for you. They dance

in me like carbonation, fermentation,
a holy coronation of vision. I see!

I am not sorry for my fleshy eyes,
their quantum mechanical missteps.

Blind to union, they are more than generous,
offering up the object of your wet face.

They know enough to close with pleasure,
savoring our swaying tête-à-tête.

True, there is no duad in this world.
Merge is the song stirred matter sings,

sang Walt, who taught me: gather
his water in your hands and wait for salt.

Come morning, I wore my palms
upon my face, a mask to breathe and taste,

peered darkly into luminous depths.
There is no floor in you, my dear.

No use begging for harbor or land;
no fearing my own swollen surf, or yours.

Return, return. Our liquid bliss unfurls on granite
oaths and buoyed words, a winter hurricane.

I whisper, even earth is no real anchor.
Look! When towns and trees uproot,

sky inhabits roofless rooms, rearranges
what is wooden into moorless doors.

Blown open, we fly through.

2012
with thanks to Whitman for the title

Migration of the Snows and Blues

The silage field empty
of nothing but a honking island
of a thousand snow geese,
I stop for what could be mine.

Overhead hundreds circle,
settle undetectably, safe,
swiftly emptying the sky
of white and grey skeins.

I wait for everyone to land,
walk beauty-hungry and wingless
toward them. Two or three sense
my strange approach and drift.

I step slowly, broad shouldered
with great love and homeless desire
over corn-rich clods to see the island lift.
Today, after you, this is my only power.

Cradling the flock’s racing hearts,
a sparkling surge of countless, prudent v’s
sings one high pitch of blue solidarity
slanted for miles and miles away from me.

2012

On the Upbeat

The water of the sound of and in you
spreads light in salted rivulets

from highlit crown to flashing
clavicle and liquid notch

through—gasp—
your heart’s black springs

past dampened cotton collar lip
where goblet eyes and palms

can only guess the gleam
of gravity’s clandestine lines.

This joy can never fully know.
But O! we clutch and sing,

evaporate and brim
our thinning clothes.

2012