What did you know when you started? Darkness and light. A field in bloom. A fallow plot impatient for tilling. A father leaving. A father dying. A father spread across turgid waters. The rough hands of men. Dirty fingernails. Sour breath. Half curves of sarcastic smiles. Men who leave. Men who smell like vodka crans and reflux. Men who speak in caesuras. Two weeks a year visitation. A woman lurking in the background of a portrait of a father and a son. Slamming cupboards. Banshee screams. A monster lingering on into baccalaureate dreamscapes torn at the edges by the swampy fingerprints of a father and a shrieking succubus. Opening for men hungry to satiate themselves with any passing prey. Driving the sword in a little deeper each time until guts gave way to hollow. Walking around a wounded wendigo. Red and empty. What do you know now? Darkness in light. Fields bloom and die. A mother loves and a mother dies. The lotus seeds at its death. Dies as it seeds. Life is breath. Exhalation a shape sighed into air. Exaltation a trumpet blown at heaven whose notes die in the troposphere. We begin but never end even when the soul exits our bone shields and our flesh suits. Still we are cruel to our bodies, to other bodies. To every body. Prayers die in the exosphere. Sound waves travel forever. Ambrosia runs through the veins of those who most suffer. No one knows who will inherit the earth and that is the wrong question to ask. I remember the time before the body but not why I agreed to be embodied. If I don’t infuse this corporeal cage with joy I will become entombed. Evidence builds each day pointing to the importance of the minuscule over the mammoth. Who were you then? A boy without a form. A shape yet to be filled. I played cinema on my canvas. Summoned gods to my page. I was a boy at the top of a staircase. A boy in a man’s body playing the role of student, service worker. A boy in a man’s body wearing women’s cardigans and cut off shorts in 74 degree weather chasing shots on Ocean Beach around a bonfire. A boy in a man’s body trading coasts and cuisines. Late bloomer. Grad student to student teacher pipeline. Prodigal son to surrogate parent to 12 kids. Moonlight poet and adult educator. A fallow plot impatient for tilling. Who are you now? A single petal on a lotus flower mid-bloom. A single petal’s pink tip emerging from dank water. The journey is never clean, or linear. The layering of a vocal harmony heavy on the bass. A speaker switched on and crescendoed to a zenith point in surround sound. A mother cat gathering her kittens into the warmth of a down blanket. A mother bird nudging her chicks off the branch. An invisible hand on which the chicks ride through air. A cauldron bubbling spells for healing. A field blooming in the night. Who brought you here? The woman in mourning chasing a vulture down a highway. The poet who voiced the iris. The woman who cast out seven devils and buried scissors in her front yard. The poet haunted by a past not more than a decade old. The woman wrapped in fable, her arms around her son and a black swan. The poet who sonnets the universe and the poet who sonnets the midwest. The woman with an altar ego who found grace in the mirror. Who did you meet here? The poet who opened her wound and spoke from its lips. The poet of the Windy City who would later personify and memorialize the big winds and high waters that attacked the Big Easy. The poet who spoke of the borders, of his heart, of his home, of his country. The poet who couldn’t be contained on the page, whose words splattered beyond the white margins. The poet who noveled a town and a world and a people and a spell, weaving language into cinema into consciousness. The poet who somersaulted and leapfrogged and hula hooped and shimmied her way through any form. The poet who made the elements effable and the ineffable elemental. Who will you carry forward with you? Everyone.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
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