A Tara Birch poem just for you

A Tara Birch poem just for you, written while waiting for my son to steal away my computer so he can write an essay that he should have written yesterday (so it's a good thing he's a smart boy and gets all A's in school and causes us so little grief that sometimes we forget he is here and as scared as any of us)

last night I couldn't read the screen
with the biographical text of all the important
parts and counterparts

the major actors, the lesser characters
the smiling, charming effusive director
relentless in his praise for the city
of his dreams, the fabrication he made
that still stands

I couldn't read -- until I tilted the frames
of my eyeglasses, adjusted
the light flowing from there to here

inside my retinas, inside the excited rods and cones

how entertaining to grow old!




Last night, the dark returned to my head,
I lay in bed, dreaming awake
of the essay I'd write:

redemption was to be the theme, how it can't
be coerced, how it can't

be denied by God or Man or demons in drag
fluttering their hands, demanding allegiance

to hate. It was to be the best thing
I'd ever write, but now I won't.

It summoned me last night and now
it's recalcitrant,

refusing my call, refusing to speak
in the open light.




There are many pains I've acquainted myself with
over the course of this life:

self-inflicted burns, cuts, ingested poisons
and the sad sweep

of bleary looks at ceilings and floors and
bedspreads and skin

indifferent to touch. And of these? The worst
was the heart

filled as a balloon and drifting apart, pushing up
forcing itself out

uncontained as I lay on the couch, silent
and afraid of breath, of each beat,

of death as a welcome home, as surcease
for the void of what comes next

each second, each tick
of the clock or the watch on my wrist.




my nephew has found himself again
in the hospital, the cold blue tubes attached
to his arm

coming back from swimming in the murk of himself
which means of course

the brain he has refuses to work, refuses to match
the rhythms that others have
turing on, turing off in patterns of thought:

excite, repress, excite, repress --

those aren't the ways his brain accomplished
his task. instead it stopped
taking command of itself, stopped turning off

just pushed and pushed and pushed
the damn button until it stuck and his body
seized up, pale, ghost-rigid beneath

his poor parents' fear.

my brother says he spoke just once before giving up:
I know you're here.






why am I not here? a good question and one
I'd prefer to elide

because poetry has not been on my mind

unless forced out by a game


I listen to my daughter scream, or to her songs
parody songs the young always find

so amusing to sing:


Gawd bless my underwear!


and I read of a woman who was raped and then
sentenced to death by yemeni men

for adulterous relationships (but really for defiling
her husband)

and then she was saved because a small child
had wormed its way into her womb


and for two long years after birth she has lived with that thought, that her child saved her life


but for only a brief, unrelenting span

knowing his birth day, the remembrance of that
would also be the remembrance of the day they took him from her arms

to finish what had only been paused


I think of that woman, and her child, and the way
the earth turns

in our own backyards, grinding into the path
of the holocaust to come

unless we stop

for each of us is  private, and lost to ourselves, threat,
for all of us a too large to think about threat



and you ask where has she gone?







she's been disappearing for years