Joshua Tree

 Scratch
of sandy crust and
mosquito song
Around and up I twist my hands
toward sky beyond bush, bird, beetle

Slaughterhouse
of screeching shrikes
My thumbs the helpless killing floors
of writhing lizards
Their blood runs down my arms

Stumble
toward altars to erosion
who appeared but were not formed
Time forces them ever higher
My roots ever wider

Searching
starving for the water
who fled taking all gods except
the Sun.

She Who Goes

I.
Long have I lain in wait for you,
my beautiful one.
Demons also have waited
Sucking with thin, tight lips
at the breath I gave you.
Even now, one sits at your head,
another at your feet,
a third on your belly,
thieves peering in through frosted windows.
I swear, they shall not have you.

Many years I have watched your
Blooming and declining,
my precious flower,
lovely and rare.

Now, you shall come with me
No one, not even the animals,
Nor your children and their demons,
Can follow us.
At last, you shall know me,
as I have long desired you to know me
crouching just out of view.
Your voice intoning my name,
in lament and celebration
pleading and praising
has been great comfort in my waiting
Only listen now, listen
to my summons.

My arm comes surely for you now,
as my heart leaps wildly in jealous anticipation
Behold, I escort you into my kingdom,
my banquet hall, my home
Go into the earth, and rest in me.

II.
Long have I remained with you,
fought with wild eyes to give you
my lungs, my heart, my liver, my veins
so that I might remain with you still

Now, you are going.
I cannot see where,
it is hidden, dark, airless.
Tell me, and I shall go too
With force past any gate

I must go with you
else who will protect
from lurking savagery
cruel beasts of torment
I am wasted with fighting
as you are wasted with living
Life I hardly know anymore
and will not when you are silent and still

Your breath is thin with pain
mine all too thick with loss
If you go,
my search will end only in
the same darkness into which you have gone.

Walking on the Sea

It is said that Jesus walked on the water, and that it was a miracle. While out on the sea, Jesus then called to Peter, and so long as the man's faith remained strong, he too was able to walk across the water without trouble. So say the Scriptures, and so the Scriptures reveal their geography. For to walk on the Sea of Galilee is truly a miracle - such warm waters could never ordinarily hold two human beings upright.

In the north, however, to walk on the water is for everyone. A few months out of every year, the water freezes thick and solid as far as the eye can see - the lakes, streams, bays, inlets, out to some indeterminate point in the open water. The ice is quite thick - a foot or more - and feels solid as land. Covered by a thick layer of snow, it is not even slippery, and confronts the eye only as a seeming wasteland of open snow - unless familiar with the geography of the area, there is no particular reason to know that water flows dense and cold below these vast, flat expanses.

For most here, walking on the ice is quotidian. It is their seasonal shortcut to work or to school, their Sunday afternoon walk or ski, a fishing trip, a chance to get out under the dark gray sky of their homeland. For me, on the other hand, it is immense and magical - magical in its novelty and immense in its possibility.

Growing up in Virginia, going to college in her southeast tidewater, I never imagined the possibility of walking for hours on a frozen bay, with the icy sea wind cutting across my face. The multitude of tracks attests to the stability of route. They wind every which way - around the perimeter of Laajasalo, heading straight toward the open sea, cutting between the islands and showing the paths of exuberant dogs dashing about with their human families.

What is it like? Sometimes, it is an expansive desert, a terrifying wasteland. The wind blows with forces unknown on land, tossing the snow like sand into drifts of varying depths. Out in the middle of the bay, the wind has managed to scrape the ice almost bare, while on the edges, it is piled much more thickly. It is also a view of the dome of the sky. The landscape of southern Finland is comprised of rocky mounds, rolling hills and and tall trees - an unobstructed view of the horizon is quite rare, unless you are on top of a high point. Out on the ice, however, the darkening clouds hang low in the east, and seem to touch the icy sea, and the brighter clouds run off toward the west. You can almost sense the world turning. At the water's edge, the waves have washed up on the rocks and frozen in place. Yellowed with salt and sand, the waves seem to have leaped up from the water without ever making it back, hanging petrified over the edge of a stone on the shore, reaching long fingers toward the surface.

To walk on the sea is to know the earth in yet another way.

A Strange Place

When will the pretty thoughts return?

Empty,
Aimlessly content.
Being here, now is easy
like biking down a gentle hill
amid pastures and potato plots
Accelerating, but not too much,
Rolling.

Torment comes and goes
An old friend with whom
I pick up where we left off
whose shape changes with the years
but whose heart is always the same and
whose cold calloused hands clasp my face
as that mouth reaches for my ears
with its urgent whisperings
of the time we've lost but perhaps
it's best that I go alone sometimes
but I'm so dear and bright:
beloved!

Peace is a strange place
I only find by stumbling
among the birches and berry bushes
tripping inside myself
on glacial boulders face-up in the sun
leaping the fissures and ravines
of earth's trickling tap,
my worn in ways of going
toward the end, or the beginning.

The Well

Pinhole to the sky -
Dry spaces lit by fire suddenly struck
by fits of weeping into me:
I shall hold it all.
My stomach ever-expanding
bloated, gaunt
For want of things non-existent,
Since ice ages ever the same
Heaving and sighing of seasons.

Be not awakened to these plummeting
Cavernous depths all streaked with algae,
But return to me with desires those
Pieces of earth-core etched with lost grandeur
And your longing will dissolve with centuries
Into iron. 

Boston

A city of ghosts.
Now, for me
Hovering just out of reach
I paid them in grief
Wept and wore ashes
the allotted days, but
They do not rest.

Lie in peace!
For you have found the
Promised Land
the citrus blooming
quaking dust-hills of
All that cannot survive here.
That land is your land,
and this is not mine,
As it takes your shape.

Who could have guessed
Your spiritual strength -
the way your soul could
Span an entire continent

I came here
but for the magnificent un-reason
you awakened in me.
Those three years of long madness
Grateful when you granted me
Ground to stand on.

All around, desire of my heart,
Your orchids bloom
a dark sweet taste melts on my tongue
and music clusters away silence

More than a year, now,
Since you
Breathed this air
Why do you refuse admittance
to forgetfulness?

Once, I feared to be alone but here,
in the company of specters
I envy the flowers
Content to return to the
Dust to which they are already rooted.

A Wish

My desire to know you unbounded,
I seek
a dwelling where I know the
Ground before the air
to curl my hands, Dearest,
around the broken
Places in your line of vision and
The Hunter in me tracking
rippled waters, tracing
your scent still warm along my ribcage.

I am not the healer, the Savior
Merely the muddy acceptance
of a shallow grave in the
field of wildflowers:
decaying matter, lifeblood
of possibility.

Petition

O Lord,
Let me not mistake
the blindly groping after a
Candle to shine into the mirror
for Love.

Nor let me think
any consummation
be completion on this
unfinished Earth.

Gloucester Revisited

We perch on the rocks,
Our feet gentle sparrow claws curled
around the grooves,
In the summer that will not die:
Slanting spear-light on water
Small smooth stones skipping out to sea
As our feet across the stony gaps.
Joyful, free, until in the shade:

A goose, long neck wrapped around its body
At rest, swarmed with flies
Suffering that does not suffer.

Your stones skipping so far
Nimble, precise, 
Past the edge of vision into the sun.
Then, the glistening black otter
Stretched out beneath my feet
Shining, swimming towards a shore
It never knew it reached.

These prophecies of decay, their signs
and symbols, must all come true:
This world will never come again.

Migratory, I return there
to the summer that would not die,
the warm rocks that hold back the sea
and frame the sky's chandelier -
What nature foretold, is realized.
The sun slants over the water
as the evenings grow short
in a rush of wind, the
hushed breath telling me tales,
Winter without your warmth
As the sun slips deeply
and those still-smooth stones grow cool beneath me:
In darkness, loss.

Not long away, perhaps on a day like this
of strange brightness,
I will cede you to the West, while
The tide rises forever and
Joy's long struggle
Washes over all that was a
Warm birdsong of hope,
Freedom of solid ground, and
The patience of a twisted tree.

Nature

she whom we call Mother
destroys us all:
even as we call out her name,
she crushes us.

beneath the sun's broad gaze,
she kills her offspring
if not with time,
with fields of ice,
or hot ravenous tears.

with roaring, rattling bones 
and the red hot blood of her core.

The Aftermath

Lying there awake
After, staring up at

I don't know what -
Your arm draped across
Night in the window
Half open, your mouth and
The murmuring breath

- happens or means happiness
Peace comes to those, 

Wondering: if others think all
Rushed and overlapping
part conscious.

- who sing night to themselves.

The cool breeze becomes
Shivering, curling closer
More regular in my ear

My receding visions,
Ceiling drops away
More widely spaced

So heavy and free,
like icebergs newly calved.

Fragment

The constancy of regret,
my truest friend
you have the power to keep
the past ever alive,
dancing before me

the warm, sorrowful longing
wells up when i revisit
that youthful faith
or curl up against
the black jersey bedsheets

"If This Should Be, I Say:

You of my heart!"*

I miss you,
the waves crashing
on the backs of our heads...

Meanwhile,
your blood spilling in the parking lot
racing in circles
of bright drops flying
trying to find the long-beloved,
now-forgotten place

I wrapped you up warm,
said I'd never run away
Even as my feet were already
jumping forth into that autumn.

What will I do when you leave
for all the more beautiful places?
When it all comes again
The price of adventure, solitude
and fulfillment, the fruit of abandonment.
And thus,
the world will avenge.

Then, comes the quiet thought,
of a solution rooted in failure,
and its companion:
abject imprisonment.
But just a thought,
Never a wish.

Outside of myself,
Everywhere is too far away. But yet,
Nothing can be held so tight
without bursting into hundreds,
Thousands of streaking shrapnels.

And so,
I am always letting go.

All life is letting go
Never holding onto anything,
Not even a breath.







* ee cummings. sonnets/unrealities xi

Moose Mug Misfortune

O moose mug,
My favorite mug!
From your lips I have sipped
O! so sweetly
Tea (and other beverages)

Every morning,
And sometimes in the evening,
I have turned to you
Seeking comfort and warmth
Two long years!
Have we shared in peace
and contentment.

And when you were broken
I could not let you go
No, never
Would I toss you away
Like any ordinary mug!
For I believed that superglue
Could heal all wounds,
And make you whole again.

Your scars barely noticeable,
We carried on as before,
Two counterpart vessels for
Tea.

Until, alas,
One fateful morning,
I filled you with boiling water, and
Watching it turn a dark Earl Grey,
Grasped your handle, which
Even as I lifted,
Broke!
Yes, ripped apart that strongest
Of all glues, sending
Fresh tea in a scalding river
Over counter, legs, floor...

O moose mug,
How I grieve at your demise!
As if at the passing of a true, dear
Friend. But,
A large, scalded portion of my leg
Reminds me of the pain
Of our most recent meeting.

Moose mug,
It was not your fault.
I will search the world
For an even stronger glue!
To make you whole again,
For breakfast is become lonely
without you,
O my moose mug.

I, prophetess

a lying bitch from the start
told my mother
it was in their bellies of course
surgery
a bit below the mark
smudged stabbing pencil blows
dirtying the white plush
turning it gray
transferring the clench of my
own body, whose purpose
yet unknown but already
complicated, twisted, secretive
pressing me to rest
hours in the basement
hurriedly hide that mirror, and
o! my best friend
sigh at that sweet smoothness even before
life as opposed to non-life
had any meaning but
already a liar

deceit
it springs like
mushrooms after rain

but when I give unto you
freely and with unfettered joy
i grow only broader, deeper like
the river rushing to contribute itself
wholly and without ever a thought
of revisiting the source
to the all-consuming, forgetful
unforgiving depths
of the sea

to put you in your place:
beside the rough oak
in the backyard
who with massive arms
holds back the sun
just as you with the stoic endurance of a thousand years
spread your jaws
to blot out my voice -
would be the work of all my strength

in this shade
with no sense of my own height
i wander gazing upward
at majesty's gentle swaying

i dream of, remember
the time of dreams
knowing that pain was
time itself remembering
no, reminding me of frailty
of the broken fragments
body and life,
forgiveness and freedom

broad sunlit fields
of love.

The Secret Garden

I was studying abroad in Germany, in some small Dorf, a cluster of painfully reconstructed medieval buildings and cobblestones, beyond which the A9 sped past through the brilliant yellow potato fields. It was late spring, with the sun pushing on toward summer, but it hardly mattered, as the school was one great labyrinth of classrooms, student apartments, a gym and the cafeteria. There was no need to go outside - the whole world was contained in the institution. And besides, we were there to learn.

Each student had a tiny apartment, equipped with a small stovetop, minifridge, a couple of cabinets, a futon, and a low table. The doors had no locks, in order to foster a community of trust and honesty.

My boyfriend was there was well, and stayed in an apartment down the hall. I had never been to his room; he always visited me in mine. Our relationship was warm and muted, with an intense intimacy that left nothing hidden. Every mundane decision was part of the web, causing and effecting us to grow together, inward upon each other into the rapidly narrowing future.

When not with him, my attention was focused on Mark, another American studying at the institute. Slender and strong, with dark hair and bright secretive eyes, he began to consume my thoughts, my existence. I was in love, though I remained silent on that account, preferring to simply bask in the resonant glow of his eyes passing lightly across my face. But even more than the joy of his presence, I reveled in the fact that now, I had a secret, something of my very own that could not belong to any other. I nurtured it in my heart, letting it grow into a secret garden of dreams. Mark was the opening of a vast new world, unstable and shifting, the intensity and freedom of summer, with the constant threat of terrifying devastation. And, unlike the rest of us, he was not there to learn.

Mark had learned all he wanted to, in discovering who had killed his brother the year before. Pure justice was his goal, and the pursuit of rightful triumph his only one. He had followed the murderer here, a resigned, patient boy who looked to be barely 16. I never was to learn his name, but I will not forget his eyes - dark, tender, deep-set stones that peered into me and knew my thoughts, and my sins. Who knows if he felt any guilt, or if the desire to see into my own deceptive, faithless heart was driven by a need to know that evil was not only in himself. He was the only one who knew I loved Mark, and loved him indiscriminately and thoughtlessly, though I never spoke a word to him.

If he did, in fact, feel any guilt, he did not at all exhibit the fear that usually accompanies such a burden - fear of punishment, or the impossibility of salvation. Rather, he accepted that he was guilty, and that Mark would take his life as the required payment for the one he had taken. Their justice had been privately agreed upon - a simple, elegant, but unsanctioned execution. Mark had asked me to assist him, and I had agreed. What is summer, without love and adventure?

The execution took place in the afternoon free time after classes, in a small storage room at the back of the gymnasium. Several groups of boys were playing basketball as Mark led the convict across the courts to the realm of justice, while I followed a few steps behind. No one seemed to notice our solemn procession, though there was no real reason for them to notice three people passing through the well-populated gym. All was calm and orderly.

The room was mostly filled with sports equipment, and the crates of basketballs cast an orange glow. It was brightly lit, but without windows, and a single wide door opened into it from the gym. Towards the back of the room was a bare ping-pong table missing its net, across which Mark had laid a rope in preparation. After we entered the room, I went to close the door, as seemed appropriate, if only out of respect for the one who would soon be dead. Mark told me to leave it open - it would be less suspicious. But if this was justice, what should we be afraid of? Another secret was embryonic, and my world broadened still more, revealing a bottomless chasm.

Mark was helping his revenge onto the table, informing him quietly that he was to be strangled. I watched in awe at the calm, and the strange tenderness in both their eyes as they regarded each other. The boy lay back, flat on the table, and Mark affixed the rope around his neck, crossing it on the front of his throat so that it could be tightened from either side. He then bent deeply over the alleged murderer, gazing at him strangely with that intent fire usually reserved for love, and said, "Tell me when you are ready." This boy looked back sweetly with his dark eyes, and spoke: "Please, tell my family what I have done, and that I have willingly submitted to justice. And please, forgive me, and stay with me while I die." Mark replied, "I will stay, and I will comfort you. It won't take long, I promise."

I stood mutely, helplessly, to the side of the table, near the boy's head. He nodded to Mark, my beloved, the executioner, and he tightened the rope.

I had seen strangulations before, but this was vastly different from any of them. This was not the bulging veins and wild eyes and contorted mouth - the purple struggle yearning toward collapse. This was calm, peace, redemption. The dying boy made neither sound nor movement, except for the gentle blinking of his eyes as he gazed sorrowfully out of himself. Mark was still bent over him, murmuring to him that it was alright and the pain would soon end. The whispering and crooning continued, and I began to grow impatient. Occasionally, a basketball would bounce dangerously close to the open doorway. We could easily be caught, and there was no hiding the fact that someone was dying in here; I could feel it pounding in my own head.

I began to pace nervously, abstractedly, and every second of the boy's decreasing but clinging life doubled my agony, again and again and again. I stood momentarily by the open door. One of the basketball players dribbled up, and said, "What's going on?" I saw my ruin. "Nothing." Or we could kill him too - kill them all, and keep silence. He shrugged, and dribbled back toward the center of the court. It was so simple, lying. If this boy had been able to lie, maybe he wouldn't be lying choking on a ping pong table.

By this point, it had been a few minutes, and the pain and desperation of fast approaching death were setting in. His legs and hands twitched, and he tried to shake his head back and forth. Impossibly, low moans began to rise from his crushed throat. Mark's comforting refrain pressed on, as did his beautiful, tender hands. "It's almost over now, and then there will be no more pain."

This boy, he was accepting punishment for his sins, but not I. I would carry mine around in a little box for years to come, while all around me, others would willingly die so as to be rid of theirs. Nothing follows in death, not even guilt. But I had my first secret, finally, and I could never expose it! I had never had one before, and the feeling was strange, ecstatic and heavy. It consumed me with its own weight, and made me know: I was a liar, a whore, and a coward. For I could not face death, and preferred the burden of my own self-created horrors. I could not even face this death anymore, happening right outside my eyes. His immanent freedom terrified me, and I crouched to the floor beside the table, sobbing and choking on my guilt, my sorrow.

"It's over," Mark said, quietly. Wordlessly, we prepared to hide the body; we took the precautions of criminals despite our conviction of justice. He looked the same as in life, except his dark eyes were gently closed, and there was a slight raw mark on his neck. We wrapped him in a faded quilt, and carried him nonchalantly through the gym and the winding halls to my apartment. No one looked askance at us, though we passed many familiar faces along the way. We put him under my futon, and a bit of the blanket showed at one end. "No one looks in the obvious places," Mark said. "I'll be back to get him in the morning. And thanks." He left.

I was alone, with a second secret, a cooling body. I must keep this secret, keep it for Mark, and let it grow cold unnoticed while nearby my love for him burns on. And this dead boy, in him was my shame and my cowardice, my perverted justice, but he was also a promise, that Mark would return, and a sign, that he trusted me. A dead murderer, keeping my love alive and making my heart brim with devotion.

I was cooking when my boyfriend came over. Sure and familiar, he watched silently, steadily, as I poured soy sauce into the pan. "I thought you didn't have any left." I shrugged.

We sat on the futon to eat, with the body just inches below us. I was terrified he would notice the end of the blanket sticking out, the edges of my infidelity leading to the unraveling of and entire future, but simultaneously knew he never would. We had no secrets. We talked about class and studying, while I thought about tomorrow morning. What if Mark didn't come? Would I be left to bear the dead alone, to bury my secret? There was already so much guilt and horror, the vast instability of his presence, or absence, had opened up, and his precarious power over life. What would he do with mine?

But inside my heart, deep inside, beyond the place where my secrets had begun to grow and form, I knew they would remain secrets. No matter how they ripped at my imagination and destroyed my peace, I would never expel them, never allow they nausea to rise to vomit, never let them be suffocated. They would form the vibrancy of a vast and unknown future, while out here, the web continued its placid intricacy. He was saying goodnight, and I knew I would be hearing him saying goodnight for the rest of my life.

Resurrection Architectures

I.
By the river,
Trees are bent toward the city
Broken, torn by the wind, stripping away
Makes trembling naked
Shuddering, shrinking back from
Bright rushing cold.

Nature fearing her own cruelty
Reaches for strange, foreign shelters
Kept warm by her burning entrails.

Who will stand up?
Raise their eyes
To go with the trees
Letting the wind crush away warmth,
Tear away colors
of blood, of gold
now strewn and
left for rot:

Abandonment
Reaches not merely those with mouths.

The sun perches desperate,
Clings rakishly to the horizon.
Desolation extends its hand,

We are torn and buried
Half the world watches, jeering.

But soon, our hearing will fade
The image of your lips half-parted darken,
Your fingers draw through my hair
and fall away,
The blood-red leaves go swirling into ice.



II.
Pressed to you
is all my forgetting,
Fading into brilliance.
Gaping wounds staunched
Filled, bursting with fresh blood.

As evening goes down to the water
As light slinks from the windows
As summer's devastation shrinks before the frost,

Your eyelids are drifting closed
on a former life,
Lashes brush away tears long frozen
hovering across the years
fragile and persistent
A shroud of mist
that numbed fingers and lips
Now touched, goes fleeing disowned
Into a future once dreamt,
In all its wretched glory.

I have known darkness,
But not this darkness.
For this one shimmers,
and my heart races to know and understand

How tiny things have immense shadows
How a single rose petal enfolds my entire body
in sweet silk, and
Why the oceans recede
When you open my wounded hands.



III.
This room, stifling cube, is
Collapsing, bursting explosive

Arms outstretched in abject wonder,
My lungs inhale the long-absent breath.
Ash and cinder washed away,
I scrape the decay from my face
As brick and cement are
Cast into the sky,
Fall screaming into the sea.

Hair aflame, the sun scorches my skin
Newly exposed after years of
Burial and frozen mud.

I lift my eyes
And the future fills the empty fields
New buds burst where before leaves bled
The sap is rising in the forest, in me
And the coarse tundra catches
Soft and damp my feet
Running, flying through the bright dawn.

The ruins are cracking
The remainders, sinking in the salt
I look back, and all around
My heartbeat rushes,
Deafening
As my fingers learn to touch
and my throat, to sing.

Behold: the screaming red air
and know,
"All is made new."

The Final Vision, II

Surrender, howls the guard
Surrender! and the dog-men
horse-women go on working,
cutting up the flesh as they trample
Ice chews their fingers to the bone.
Wind runs down the trenches
Gnashing cruel wet teeth.

Beside, the machinery sucks and grinds
with starlight energy
the surrendered.
Seeing and un-knowing,
The defiant smash the remains of their obedient future.

That roaring crushed blackness comes for all,
yet the guard encourages and pleads:

Surrender! and do not be afraid,
See, how time glistens and spits,
what is to come.
Look at the woman you love! and know -
You will be one with her as you are torn through the air
Find union in separation, and in ripping
a prelude to the final rushed pressing together
for all the earth's remainder.

No one understands,
nor do they notice as the blood mixes and seeps
through worn out shoes.
Some have closed their eyes,
inhaling as the stench arises in funereal chant,
thick and hovering.

The guard is losing his voice.
Frenzied with exhaustion, he falls
and weeping, convulsing,
his body is borne into the pounding deafness.
The Living are silent, as the Dying
crack and burst.

The earth churns beneath him.

Dull and feeble,
the senses fade.