Enshrined Deities

Enshrined Deities

People rinse their hands and mouths before speaking
to you. They write notes that are passed on to you,

and you nod as you listen, drinking in requests.
If the shrine is the body, the deity is breath, moving

freely from the camphor trees to the hall’s high beams
to the shoulder of the man on one knee is the dirt.

You might mistake his concentration for prayer,
his steadiness and silence, the sincerity with which

he touches the camera. Deities accept photography
if words don’t come. You can have any piece of their visit

that pleases you: the orange of the school children’s shirts
as they flock through the gate, perhaps. Enshrined deities

have one foot at their grounds, one foot in a garden,
one foot in the sea; you have countless feet when

you are a deity, you are an infinipede, you have no feet
or legs or form, just visitors and reverence.

The Hand is the Puppet

The Hand is the Puppet

The hand is the puppet,
palm gone mouthy,
wrist made throat.

The small body growing,
it would appear,
from your arm

talks with your voice.
No shame here,
everyone contorts

their face to summon
unpracticed accents:
scratchy twang,

drawl swooping out,
a lasso. Like putting
on a sleeve,

our limbs inhabit
miniature bodies
with little resistance,

voices we did not know
we were built with
doing the talking.

Strange to See Where

Strange to See Where

Strange to see where things land
once loosed, unhanded.

Leaves can plummet or travel,
carried by their own lack of mass.

A swath of purple flowers
along one side of the highway,

thick and bright as a stripe
of paint. Paint, for that matter,

one whole wall wet, and
drops of white freckling a cheek,

pulled up by the underside
of a shoe and tracked out the door.

Sand in the car’s upholstery
a year after the beach. A wobbly

pine seedling planted decades ago
solidly unfolding, growing, and

from its wingspan needles falling
to form a decomposing alphabet.

An Expedition

An Expedition

Let’s fill the field with gear we do not own:
a tent here, where the earth is flat and dry,
and on this side, the trunk full of paper
and microscope slides ready to clasp
glass palms around life forms, samples.
We are here to find examples, to collect
a piece that represents the whole, one moment
standing in for elephantine millenniums.
Without telescope or sextant. No tool is sensitive
enough for what we need: a way to record
how the sky above us will look in ten years,
in twenty, and where we will be watching
from then. And the charts to help us wander
back here. Sign post into night sky, that pulse
ricocheting inside of you the aftershock
of my hammer beating a hole in the heavens.

Vibrations

Vibrations

I want to reach into you
and pluck the string hiding there.
From this vibration,
energy is dislodged, traveling
like the sizzling end
of a burning fuse. Every sound
put out into creation
is a question, a request. Stars
expel light by burning,
with no consciousness to aim
for witnesses fathoms
underneath. But I send these out,
waves, and receive
tremors, echoed frequencies.