Changing Places in the Fire

What’s The Word! she cries

from her purchase on the iron

finial of the front gate to my heart.

The radio in the kitchen

is stuck in the year I was born.

The capitals of the world are burning.

And this sparrow with a woman’s face

roars in the burdened air — air crowded with voices,

but no word, mobbed with talking, but no word,

teeming with speech, but no word — 

this woman with the body of a bird

is shrieking fierce

buzzed volts

in the swarming babble, What’s The Word!

This evening

is the year of my birth.

The country has just gained its independence.

Social unrest grows rampant as the economy declines.

Under a corrupt government of the army and the rich come

years of mass poverty, decades of starving children

and racially-fueled mayhem. Word is

armed squads raping women by the hundreds. Word is

beheadings, public lynchings, and riots. Word is

burning, looting, curfews, and shoot-to-kill orders.

And word is more deadly days lie ahead.

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday, the forecast calls

for more misery, more poverty, more starvation,

more families fleeing their homes,

more refugees streaming toward every border.

More horror is to come, that’s the word.

More scapegoating is to come, that’s the word.

More violence is to come

on the roads,

in the streets,

in the homes, violence

in the churches, in the temples

where they preach who to love and who to hate.

How to get to heaven, and who to leave behind.

How to don the fleece of the blameless

and prosecute your neighbor.

All against all

is to come.

That’s the word.

Who hasn’t heard that! she spits.

You call yourself a poet? You

tame high finisher of paltry blots!

You publish doubt and call it knowledge!

You destroy the wisdom of ages

to gratify your envy!

You murder benevolence and virtue

with condescension. You pretend to poetry

and destroy imagination!

Your words mystify, mislead, and misdirect!

You ape The Word made flesh

with words made words

to multiply more words and words about your words!

And you ritualize these sterile pleasures,

miming joy, delight, and generation!

You celebrate cheap distractions!

Your theories bloom in suicide of the mind,

starvation of the heart, and mass maladies of the soul.

You mock and mimic sincerity!

You read and divine by irony!

You snare the little ones!

You pose stumbling blocks to the lame!

You dig pits for the blind!

You sell desolation!

Your science is despair!

What’s The Word!

I can tell she’s up to no good,

this feathered interval,

monument to the nano,

this deciding gram,

my Geronimo.

She’s out to overturn an empire,

to usurp principalities and powers,

just by swooping into the right assembly,

perplexing a senate, baffling a parliament,

or bewildering somebody’s crosshairs.

Not worth a farthing,

and without a cent,

she would own the realm

her shrill cries measure, trading

dying for being.

I tell her, I sang

in a church choir during one war

North American TV made famous.

I fled a burning archipelago in the rain,

on my mother’s back, in another war

nobody televised.

In the midst of wars worldwide, many

in countries whose names I can’t pronounce,

I tucked Christ’s promise and Adam’s disgrace

together with my pajamas under my pillow

each morning, unable to distinguish which

was God’s first thought, and which God’s second.

Therefore, I seek asylum

in the final word,

an exile from the first word,

and a refugee

of an illegible past.

Who hasn’t witnessed the laws of merging and parting,

blessing and killing! she says. Who isn’t

subject to the hand

that giveth and the hand that taketh,

the change of the guard,

with and without blood,

and their own dismembered history

fed to the unvanquished flowers?

Lift every clock’s face and see

the counting angels reckoning,

the killing angels

busy at their anvils.

Say what’s The Word,

or die!

It’s obvious she’s accounted

for what the wind will take,

what the moths must eat,

the ants carry away,

the Caesars keep.

She’s a breathing remnant

restored to springtime’s living cloth.

She’s a pair of scissors

trimming lament

to allow for all I don’t know.

And I can tell by the markings on her coat

and her black eyes

she knows which dreams to parse,

which to heed, and which to bury.

And look at those prehistoric feet.

No doubt, she’s realized the secret to surviving

her own tribe’s slaughter and dispersal.

Pocket dictionary

packed with signs in another language,

blazing shard of the original emanation,

Precambrian spark deposit,

igneous jot of infinite magnitude,

fiery iota,

something about her precise little beak

convinces me she grasps degree,

and knows which i’s to dot

and which to leave large and alone.

There are words, I say,

and there is The Word.

Every word is a fluctuating flame

to a wick that dies.

But The Word, The Word

is a ruling sum and drastic mean,

the standard that travels

without moving.

Words move,

but The Word is fixed,

the true blank.

The Word is the voice of the lamp,

and words are soot blackening the glass.

The movements of words engender time and death.

But The Word lives outside of time and death.

Inside time, death rules.

Life is death’s kingdom.

We live at dying’s rate.

Words are a sop for death.

But The Word is the mother of thresholds,

regulating life and death.

The Word begets presences impossible

to confirm,

given the blinding action of time

and the sea and the earth’s

turning repose.

And who is that supposed to feed?

Whose thirst would that quench?

she screeches, her voice materializing

a greater body of innumerable birds arriving at dominion,

increasing to overwhelm every mile of my heart,

that bloody aerie branching and leafing,

her feathers become all eyes and mouths,

her voice coming now from everywhere,

booming,

When the Lover is ready,

the Beloved will appear!

Say what’s The Word or we both die!

2

I’ll call her my battle angel, this evangelion.

Seraphic herald of the ninth echelon,

pleromatic aeon demanding a founding gnosis,

her voice electric tekhelet, Septuagint, a two-leaved door

opening onto porches, chambers, and courts,

her voice a Solomonic column of barley sugar.

She’s why I’m crazy.

She’s why I can’t sleep. She’s why I never

sleep. She’s why I avoid people.

She’s why I drill the eight limbs with the mud-step,

why I walk the octagon of trigrams inscribed on Wudang,

why I practice the Spiral Ox Jaw and the Tiger’s Mouth.

She’s why I’m hard to live with

and why I say,

The bread that rises in a house that fails,

The Word, father of zero and one,

is our advocate.

A shut eye we name Beginning,

The Word sleeps,

and all is darkness.

An open eye

we name The Treasure,

The Word wakes

and voices are heard among the sounds of water.

The Word dreams, and worlds appear.

And stars beyond and behind our eyes.

And the moon with its hair tied up

and its hair let down.

Bound on every side,

and wide open in the center,

The Word hosts our breath, our span, the space

of our dreaming and our thinking,

our stillness and our moving. And the emerging present

is one of its bodies.

The fulcrum, the eye, the heart enthroned,

the dove without person, homing, The Word

is a hammer raining down its songs,

a river pouring out of the mouth of the anvil.

Twin and unlike, The Word is without peer.

Black and white, it is a wheeling pair

of coincident opposites turning on a point:

Existence and Nonexistence hand in hand.

Substance and Void begetting life and death.

The Word is an open book,

and its first and last pages are missing.

It is a brother and sister

telling each other

the missing parts

of one another’s stories.

It is the lover and the beloved

constantly changing places in the fire.

And it is the wind in the treetops

outside our window,

a voice torn to pieces. Hear it?

The wind without a house, she says.

Time without a gate, she says.

A memory of the ocean

torments the trees,

a homesickness, she says.

The wind is leafing through both of our histories,

looking for a happy ending.

It is my hand moving over your body, I say,

finding more and more to know.

It is a circle of women

reciting in the round

the oldest stories of Death disguised as a traveler

or overlooked familiar, friend we shunned

for less faithful playmates.

It is a house,

and from inside come the voices of children

taking turns reading to one another.

It is their own story they read.

But why do their voices seem uneasy?

Does the moon, giant

at the window, frighten them?

Does death run amok through all

the pages of the story?

Do the pages turn by themselves?

Are there strangers in the house?

Is the house burning?

Soldiers with guns are at our door again.

Sister, quick. Change into a penny.

I’ll fold you in a handkerchief,

put you in my pocket,

and jump inside a sack of rice,

one of the uncooked kernels.

Men with knives are looking in our windows again.

Brother, hurry. Turn yourself

into one of our mother’s dolls

sitting on the living room shelf. I’ll be the dust

settling on your eyelids.

The ones wearing wings are in the yard.

The ones adorned with lightning are in the house.

The ones decorated with stars

are dividing our futures among them.

Don’t answer when they call to us in the voice of Nanny.

Don’t believe them when they promise sugar.

Don’t come out until evening,

or when you hear our mother weeping to herself.

If only I could become the mirror in her purse,

I’d never come back until the end of time.

3

The treetops buck and heave

in the night wind.

Like drunks at sea leaning

too far over a rocking bulwark.

Like a woman throwing her green and gold hair

in time to a song only she can hear.

And from inside

that windswept bulk growing darker

comes a frenzied uproar

of what must be

hundreds of hidden birds.

All that noise

of wind, leaves, and branches,

all that uttering from unseen throats,

and is there no word?

All that shrieking, iterating, crying

in the rustling leaves. All that screaming,

shrilling, running din

of squeaky wheels, radiant numbers of tongues,

beaks, hubs, wings, spokes

keening in centrifugal spinning,

and not one word?

Not any? Nor part? No bearing?

One hunger, a fanned fire, roars

in the voice of the sea.

One light eats itself, unconsumed.

The wind is taking the night apart, she says.

The wind is dismantling

the leaves, the branches, the minutes, our listening,

and finding more and more

moving pieces to index:

our hands, our mouths, our voices, recurring stairs

of an imperfect past,

a rumored present,

figures multiplying inside a mirror.

Each, alone

in his dream of the world, I say,

is host and guest, a book

and the one who reads it

by the light of a vanished childhood.

Don’t say that, she says.

We see by the light of who we are.

Look at us: you inside me

inside you. We’ve lived inside

each other from the beginning.

And from before beginning.

Before the world was ever found.

Before the world was found, I say,

I dwelled inside you,

and you breathed all through me,

in my body and its happiness,

in my body and its loneliness.

After I found the world, I had to go

looking for you. Ever since the world,

I only lose you and find you.

Lose you. And find you.

The body of the beloved

is the lover’s true homeland, she says.

I can hear you, but I can’t hear me, I say,

your voice a burning gown of song and time,

and me with my ghosts, me with my mockingbird.

Don’t say that, she says.

What is my mind, I wonder,

but the reflected light of your

voice, O, burning one, O, seeing voice, O,

speaking eye that renders us

now legible,

now indecipherable, now

strangers traveling

under assumed names.

Don’t say that, she says.

Look. A single page of the wind

copied by hand

is the volume of despair

the smallest living wing displaces.

And your voice will be your cup

each day my wings shelter

your dear, momentary earth.

My mind is several minds, I say,

each abiding differently: in your eyes,

in the smell of your hair, in your voice

moving over me, in my voice moving over you.

She says, Don’t look at your hands.

Watch the shadows they make.

I say, Moving over you, my voice crosses

out of forbidden chambers of the Emperor of China,

through chronicles of exile and death in a foreign country,

to touch the ground I touch in me

when I speak to you.

She says, A new mind makes the world new.

True words are a little blue.

And being human makes the saddest music in the world.

She says, Postpone all morning bells.

The ore lies awake inside the rock, a dream

of origin waiting to be rescued.

I say, The glare of your nakedness

confounds me, a distraction

from the darker incandescence of your being.

Inside you is the safest place to be.

The radio in the kitchen is stuck

in the year I was born.

The capitals of the world are burning.

And of all the things on my mind this evening,

words weigh the least,

Death weighs the most,

and your voice’s body

beneath my voice’s moving hand

is a green agent of freedom and law,

best friend to my earth and my ache.

Of all the things keeping me from sleep,

words weigh too much, yet not enough.

Time weighs nothing at all,

but I can’t bear it.

And your body, burdened by minutes

and ancient rites, is my favorite sad song.

One wave that gives rise to three, shoulder, hip, and knee,

your body is the Lord’s pure geometry.

Disguised as Time, your body is tears, lilies,

and the mouth of the falls.

And of all the things we’re dying from tonight,

being alive is the strangest,

surviving our histories is the saddest.

Time leaves the smallest wounds,

and your body, a mortal occasion

of timeless law,

is all the word I know.