This newborn fire

Little red rooster

.

January, 1958, The Year of Brother Rooster

.

This newborn fire

scampers across the yard,

stamps the ground with

hardscrabbled feet,

skinny, orange-scaled, tipped with nail.

.

Inside the house the mother's belly erupts in

Procession, through the window groans may

be heard, the air inside is full of sweaty faith,

serious business, women's work.

.

Somewhere, someone has written

an efficient volume on the

dismemberment of your lovers' bodies;

beneath the glare of a consumptive interest

you are, like a wick, gone out of yourself.

.

But, you are no black wick, resplendent

in your quick, provincial plumáge, muted

only by the dust spurred ascendently into

the air where it hangs around you like an

antique atonement with wood and wire and

the cackling of your thorny brood.

.

Brahma bird, you dance a firery dance of

love. Inside a woman labors. You have

announced the death of gods,

proved prophesies,

are born to war.

.

Blood cauled priest of the red carbuncle,

sturdy, turgid bird,

prodigious and possessive lover whose

heat the egging bodies of your charges

crave, plain white lovers press themselves

against your fire.

.

Behind the house, a silo full of grain, and

beyond that then the trees that lift the

January sun. Through the window the break

and snap of midwifery is heard. In the yard

the rooster's call is raised. Through a blowing

curtain, a nascent yowl springs forward. A gasp.

Exhaustion and relief.

.

The rumpled hens of morning pass the word,

garbled pidgin spreads from roost to roost,

infiltrates the busy air like droppings

everywhere, like feathers plucked, like blood

and semen, like bodies intertwined in the

cracked shell of a summer night.

Love me two times times two

.

Love Is Never Having To

Say You're Crushed

.

I don't know that I have ever been

as in love with anyone as I have

been with you. There was that

golden girl, the one with the cello

standing in the corner of her room,

the one whose hands were sculpted

by Michelangelo, a love many years

old, much distanced now. And, even

that cannot compare.

The quality of that dream love was

that of children playing. But,

our love

--it feels like life and death,

quite adult you know--like a blade

edging meat from bone, precise and

earthy,

our love.

Plans fold--you must fight very

hard to hold yours up against

our love.

I know it will not be. I have chosen

too, another thing,

some-thing-not-this-love.

It was too big for us,

our love.

Life's a long song

Heart Song

Today is a day for a song.

An elucidatory song that draws you

and I further along toward our

destinytions, a song that rings

unbroken until each can say,

finally, "I am my own country."

First we listen, and after we hear,

we sing--

auricular sidereal tarrying at the

speed of sound, a song sung

somewhere between light and

solidity, composed of each, a great

Mass of praise meant for no one in

particular except the poet-praiser,

moved to sing simply because he is

moved at all.

This is the miracle, read in pages

of a day and flung outward, toward

the sea, a churning-wave-song, a

sound not unlike that unsufferable

cat whose purring sleep-song rises

out of a basket of blankets, sifts

through soft savannah grasses,

along heavy chains constructed of

bone and conjured in the muffled

ease of dream where feet pound

earth, elder sages heal the sick,

where otters hunt great salmon,

where, along the banks of a silver

river the rising smoke of funeral

pyres builds and joins in billowing

clouds of passing, where fruits

grow fat and fall at the feet of

children, children laughing,

children singing, "Gone, gone,

gone to the other shore, gone

together

to the other shore . . ."

A diadem song to stand against

the visceral gods of carnage.

These children dance. They tie

flowers in their hair. And in their

voices, in their one voice, they sing

an unceasing song, "Gone, gone,

gone to the other shore, gone

together to the other shore.

O Awakening!

All hail!"

Loosing in the sky with diamonds

Mine, Not Yours--Fear and Anger, Lust

and Possession, Murder--of Course

I will take twenty minutes now,
not to think or ponder, not to regret
nor brood nor fear, but just to say

I hurt, that I have entered an ugly

time, the dark thing that has always

stood between you and me. And,

because its mere potentiality was

what stretched your distancing arm,

I thought I'd call it forth--a stupid,

angry thing to do, I know. But I could

not bear being shut away by you

because of something that did not

happen, as if betrayed for holding

onto light, unrewarded for fending

off the dark (as if that was not its own

reward).

I walked to the morning sun,

but this darkness would not budge.

Who invited this thing that stars shun

into my life? What sentient being said,

give him wine to drink until his feet are

thick with darkness?

If only I could extrapolate light from a

sticky piece of warm rice, the red-gold

light of tea made from forty-seven roots

of sorrow. Having sipped it, a man may

step inside its center.

After that I can say, God, I release you.

Ex-wife, I release you. Mother, father, I

release you. Teacher, you are released.

It is a lesson learned. Letting go so as not

to lose one's grip. Twenty minutes are up

so I must end now.

But you, best girl ever, you are harder to

let go of than the rest. Loosing you may

take another twenty minutes yet.

Kasyapa at the gates

Rain Maker

Shaman

My name is Joaquin Tirado, and I have just arrived back from the dead. For me, this is just a little night walk to the thatched huts of the elders. They are not the kind that whisper behind the backs of children. These ancestors know the stars and the sky and the brown earth beneath our feet are only a universe riding a body of sand. They speak in sparse, accented lyric.

Myself, I take a little wine each morning. Though only a youth, I live in an old body, worn. I can tell you there is a moment when the Deep unfurls its tipped, penumbrous head, in fields of things best left where they stand, tall stalks of the dead, heads weighed and bent like the fat seeded pods of November sunflowers. There I am a black bird sheltering beneath their husks. They tie the smallest whispers, laments and stories of love, stories of love to my feathers. As I fly up and away, back to my own, these rain from my bird-body like little torches. I have been told that from the ground they look like stars.