Its ear attunes homage to those wings

that would entice a consort’s tailored song.

Where carapace affects a telephone

it listens beyond longing’s least unease

to hear inside a trigger-scale of notes

like a rapper’s staccato hail of words—

the key that calls the quiet gamut out

writhing, to burrow in the singer’s gut.

Down there what governs and endures is this:

a screeching in the music of the spheres

where one of all that symphony will feed

on living meat until the husk exhumes.

So out pulses shroud-faced Eurydice

with Orpheus’s body for its womb.

New England white church white
meeting house on green commons

where slaves could not stroll at night
in Boston carry sticks or canes

where African slaves were first bought
with Pequots captured in Just warre

where slaves were sometimes sold in taverns

where churches bought them for ministers

where ministers lawyers doctors farmers
used them for cutting carting hoeing
husking mowing ferrying carrying

and where in any case the slave trade . . .

where the last slave died in 1859 in Rhode Island

oh New England your white meeting broken oh

#7 and #31 from White Papers, by Martha Collins  c 2012.  All rights are controlled by The University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA  15260.  Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

coming home to front
door closing back to back
to roost pigeons whitened

doves among white
blossoms trees limbs
swaying eyes gleaming

teeth bones remaining
dangling fleshless white
bodies underneath after all

#7 and #31 from White Papers, by Martha Collins  c 2012.  All rights are controlled by The University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA  15260.  Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

I. Evening

Leisurely, the evening sky puts on the robe

held up for it by a crown of ancient trees;

you watch, and the realms move apart like lovers—

one travels heavenwards, and the other one falls

and lets you be, bound to neither universe,

nor quite so dark as the house with its silence,

nor wholly so certain as eternity implored,

like whatever it is that becomes a star and rises—

and lets you be (to unravel beyond language)

your life, with its fear and infinity burgeoning,

so that, now walled in, now encompassing all,

it pulsates in you—stone, star, wave, particle.

II. All Souls

Gentlemen, ladies—a scrum of grieving friends—

sow their flowers now, the blue and the red,

on graves where the dusk sun lowers its curtain.

Poor, helpless puppets, they rehearse before death.

How rife with fear they look, how beaten to dust

standing here, shadows behind darkened shrubs.

Cries of the unborn keen in the autumn gusts

and someone watches lights in crazy reelings flitter.

The moans of lovers are breathing in the branches,

and with them rot bodies of a mother and child.

How unreal the roundabout of the living’s dance

and how strangely mingled with the evening wind.

Their lives are so plagued, brokenhearted, lacerated.

Have mercy, God, on women’s torments and despair,

and on these requiems, so hopeless and desolate.

Hushed, the lonely wander through vaulting halls of stars.

III. The Way

Greatness—you wanted it, too, but love hurls

everything down, grief grovels us till we’re tame,

though not for nothing are all of us bowed

back to the fetal cringe from which we came.

Go any which way. Somewhere in sacred night

dumb nature schemes our hatching brood of days;

just so, bent from hell’s own cowering heights,

is there nothing straight, nothing not astray?

I’ve suffered enough to know this—to my knowledge

never have the heavenly, the upholders of all,

never have they guided me like mortal masters

with care and caution along a level path.

Human, assay everything, so bespeak the Heavens,

so that fed on the living core you will learn

to give thanks to all that is, and grasp the freedom

to go where you will, having torn your self asunder.

IV. The Seeker

Like beings that exist in distant nebulae

we pass, revenants, from dream to dream,

we descend right through the blinding walls

of light bending through its seven-fold prism—

but invisible as glass, at last, and wordless,

the quantum singularity of death

held up in eternity’s crystal chalice,

and night’s wing beats laid bare, with every mystery.

its inner antennae flame with your need.

At your every return it returns your wants,

this blind, en-frosted eye that lets you see.

Its inner antennae flame with your need

and lightning’s white sum. Behind the shade

this blind, en-frosted eye that lets you see

calms with the comforts of a brilliant cave

you return to each night behind your shade

where you mull and move in a bright shower

calm as the comforts of a brilliant cave,

or waves in the wake of a moiling river

that glints along its shoreline like a knife.

At your every return it returns your wants,

those ambient rhythms of gain and grief

less than a gnat’s hum.  In the vast expanse

what glints along its shoreline like a knife

when the light clicks on feels palpably here

in ambient rhythms of gain and grief,

though it’s the finer current you would revere

with each flyblown, intergalactic wave

somewhere roving the universal stir

“in all the majesty of light arrayed.”

Its hymn haunts quietly of something more,

this blind en-frosted eye that lets you see.

At your every return it returns your wants,

its inner antennae aflame with your need,

less than a gnat’s hum in the vast expanse.

1. As the Gods Who All Things Know

You would save the harrowed from their foregone fall,

as though a wish could mend a broken seal,

the numb wound sharpen its nerve again, to heal

clean back to its raw complaint.  The angel

at the gate beyond the impasse wields his peace,

a flaming sword stanched tamely in its sheathe,

still flauntingly phallic, but secreted as the

dream of some hidden, heaven-presiding face.

You keep this filtered vigil and endure

the blindfold’s vista, the TV’s chattered light,

glimpse the fruit intact on it’s un-bleeding tree.

Too much: a neat drink, and arm the door.

You, at least, are well who have beheld the sign

that hawks how each day’s work will bring its ease.

1. With a Glint of the Red Horse

The wind in the flue like a great sheet luffing.

Or is it the flag of the Geist’s disposition,

it’s wing-flap un-battened in the jet stream’s trough?

Across slate rooflines the clouds rove in Kevlar.

Armies watch them pass through goggles bright with jaundice.

When the seas incline to rise, will fish be their semaphore?

With factional rhyme fictional, with sin, synopsis.

With trope rhyme entropy, with godhead rhyme goaded.

Your hand in another’s is all you know of Aves.

Home without a hearth leaves the universe stranded

and larvae consume a beech-bole’s thriving Summa.

A flatworm in marl is the earth’s next genesis.

With murmur rhyme memory, with shockwave rhyme salve.

With thresher rhyme threshold, with end rhyme and….

All I saw was how fire had eaten the honey
of his flesh.

Up one leg and into a shoulder,
most of a cheek.

And yet he stood, cradled
the rack, eyes

wet, blistered with shock,
as the cage closed

and the cables snickered in.
I thought Michelangelo’s

Christ,
cool stone

(orderly at his elbow,
me carrying vials of blood

STAT
to C-Lab).

That seven story lift—last shaft of peacefulness
before the searing

sheeted in
and they’d peel

away his clothes, that fine webbing
of synthetic

and arm.
What howls rose then

beyond the heavy swinging doors
of the Burn Ward?

I walked by for weeks,
tried to see

the debridement,
the reverse burning,

water for
fire—the grafting—

the man partially lizard in that clean room.
The nurses’ bodies

through the Demerol
like raw angels

dabbing his burning half with a cotton ball
soaked in silver

until
he was chromed and barred.

A kind of xylophone whose primary song
was pain.

Cool stoke of the hammer:
new flesh (howl),

dream of wife’s body, island
he could sink his whole mouth onto,

healed (howl), risen
(howl again)—

time like an anvil—
somebody’s face (mine often)

pressed one side of a page-sized window
scratched by breath and hand.

When it comes time for the mourners
To say a few words about you
Will your lives stand up one by one
And reveal secrets that will leave others aghast
Thinking they never really knew who you were

Will they recite a litany of all your wrongs
Beginning in childhood and continuing far too long
The angry words the hurtful acts the shameful deeds
Will they accuse and blame and indict you
As you have done yourself so many 3 A.M.s?

Or will they instead celebrate how ardently you loved
How fiercely you stood your ground how artfully
You fashioned victories from defeat’s tangled debris
And when your coffin passes by give you a wink and a thumbs-up
Then join the procession out the door and vanish into the rain

cream, eggshell, lace, you name it,
all the words for white with a hint

of some interloper. A friend told me
babies are parasites, little bugs

on the backs of their parents.
No one would know it was winter

except for that blizzard thing.
Cars hiding in their drifts.

Boston tilts back in the snow.
I’m eight months pregnant

and banned from shoveling.
The bambino takes his own

kind of nap in the little fishbowl.
We talk every day about hair color,

genetics, the way others discuss weather.
Soft things that fall from the sky.

People tell me this is the calm
before, as if a baby were slightly

venomous or an act of God on
an insurance claim. The first thing

a fetus owns are nicknames.
This little habanero takes

what he needs from my own
sturdy bones. You shovel in a world

without corners. Mailboxes
far away, migrating incrementally

toward the next house, and the snow,
drifting, without a place of its own.