Alembic

Alembic

The heat in the palm of your hand’s

a trivet I set my heart against.

Bare and without a bowl the only home is

is air and the care of your slight brine

tongue’s a simple wine in the tabernacle

of your mouth.  The votive sacral

light is lit in your iris.  Your ruby blaze,

contained but at ache of praying,

waits between the closing

of the doors and the knock, a primed

pump hearing, the ear rising, the draw

of years after dowsing this spot

and water, always water, we smell

it first, a scent of subtle musk

at lie on the arm held out, at reach, see?  Eat!

Moth, 2:30 a.m.

Moth, 2:30 a.m.

Mustn’t she?  In weather like this?  Because a month ago

it was forty degrees warmer it was warm so warm on the ground

she didn’t need this: at two thirty in the morning when the click

of the latch in my brain is a meek concussion when the knob on the door

turns as by some prowl a small light two really pointing

down but going up too up enough to illuminate the tree

branches outside to be a soft electric dependable moon oh yes

she needs dependable.  Tap.  Tap Tap.  It’s the tap of her thin finger

carapace her sleeve her sheath from thorax to abdomen that really clashes

with the glass but not a clash really more a desperate act of getting

it all out before she in thischill beats as much warmth into herself as she can.

It’s 28 degrees outside.  And when light arrives it’s proving to be see

your breath weather.  She (and this is fleeting it is so brief) she is a measure

of foreboding a messenger with her thin needy wings and my funeral

light is the only one on in the neighborhood.  But listen: in this second floor

bedroom when my daughter when she was small used to sleep in a crib

under this window she'd toss off  her blanket her milk dreams her unzipped

cocoon.  And a tiny nightlight under the window.  And that very same :  Tap.  Tap

Tap.  But brief.  Because she was born on the edge of winter.  It was as generous 

as an early green in the way it drops off at night and makes us follow warm and then

a hot summer then back to winter to turn the bed down to pull the old quilt up right

to the chin the way this light must seem to do to the moth.  It seduces.  She

can’t help her brief life.  Or her urge to light and to fly the rest of it up

to the glass and tap in, spending the last of herself arriving, arriving.

After the Total Lunar Eclipse

After the Total Lunar Eclipse

Where does a smile go, or the upward

            glance,

the sudden warm movement of the

            heart?

                        Does the

            universe

we dissolve into

taste of us a little?

                        Rilke, from The Second Duino Elegy            

Content to dwell in glimpses, in lifted

curtains, to save myself I turn

as when the zucchetto of the sky

slips but is invisibly steadied, and I come back

inside while our whole world’s 

awe gawk and night drunk.  I’ll take you

full in the face, but I’ll duck under

the wide skirt of the maple and hide,

not shy, but, what’s it called? the other awe,

the I’ve held you in the dark while you broke

open awe, the coming through into thaw

after a long, long winter out?  I think:

in the cradle of my elbow, where a new baby’s

almost always content, there your head

sunk in rest in me, sunk deep beneath (others,

gawkers, scoff, but we blink them

away) and times like these, rare beneath fall’s

shifts and canopies, I’m the Magdela

on her knees and Jesus, dead and free, finally

draws open her veil.  And though soldiers, though

brothers rant or weep, she, with all the bloody

muster, wipes the stones, gibbet, and all,

rubs up the air, temple stones, road stones,

any cauterizing- the- puncture stone,

cascading into the hole when it’s all, after

the appointed hour, lifted out.  And when, open-

mouthed like the cave, it goes dark as gelded

breath and she tastes in such dark the betraying

rain, it’s musth-dust, the brand new

sweating hollow.  Oh Mary.  We have only

to look and look

away.  We come back with the winding

sheets and the sweet viscous grease.  Under our

gauze this eclipse never passes.  But we

step out, stumble over, fall through.  Soon

the light of noon.  Soon the second then

the third day.  Soon the closed stone’s rolled.

Soon, though veiled, soon: she/he

you/me: Rabboni! Free.