Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks
—William Carlos Williams
the rocks
—William Carlos Williams
I was born
attentive toward the growth of grasses
We grew like grass through cracks in the concrete my mother
once said
of her wartime childhood sometimes
we were happy
I tightened the loose and careless knots of my devotion
The city kept changing
its name
And am I
ever eventual as the anticipated aftermath ever
the sickness
and the cure
When did I begin —
What word
began—
What war—
I tend my garden of turbines, my tornado farm
I wanted to marry
the ghost
the long held notes and rousing bars
of the hymn of the republic
But first the filial responsibilities
to keep the ancestors
fed and watered
I found them
nearly forgotten
where I had left them
licking the moisture condensing on the cavern walls
What names
do the animals have for us
I wondered
There is no comfort and there is no ease
Here we are winging the humid emptiness the day’s endless shallow
It licks feebly at the shins and barely skims the knees with its chalky silt
I’m no good at autobiography I wake up
and can’t remember what day it is or what city I am in
I’m too embarrassed to ask you to remind me
But I dream about the city Did my nostalgia to return
to the singed and scrawled on city of my childhood destroy the city
Which is to say: did my love
for the city as it was destroy
the city as it is
I dream the master tells me: for poetry
you need meter, meaning
and lust
This sounds plausible enough I am attentive
to the master
I write her dictum
in my small black notebook
But all the informal pronouns have been discarded littering the streets
Held breath and averted eyes
Trace elements
Handprints on the trees
And the beloved evaporates— dew
in the mountain meadow under a blazing alpine sun
The painter paints a horse—then cuts it in half
The human face—I know—was once a sanctuary
Remind me then:
What day it is What city I am in
We grew like dandelion weed clover saxifrage
We were an indelible and ineluctable fact We un-wove ourselves
from the black earth blew westward
across the continent tossed with the flotsam in the jet stream’s draft
We were a wailing wind its indelicate melody
We were the snags in the weft of your syntax We mispronounced
our own names clustered raggedly
too unashamed of our indigence too boisterous
Someone said indignantly You are not
an indigenous species but an ineradicable strain on the system
You who have always courted your own catastrophe
Was it hurricane season Was it the clawing rake
of wind and water against the work of industry
Was it a fallen tree the frightened dog trailing its leash whimpering nearby
The aluminum YIELD aluminum STOP rattling and moaning
The ONE WAY arrow spinning like a weathervane
A shaky hand calamitous colloquy
Was it exhilaration at a distance closing between the mighty
and the All-Mighty closing but not entirely