into Being

into Being

Until I hold you all
up.  Until the light is far enough. 

And away. I didn't know 

how smudged you'd be

how smeared with the force
of the swim the cool June.  And back

out but dead.  How dusted with crusts

of cheese, how feeding this feast

(but not in order)to the other

people at the table would seem

an absolute.  An ordinary fact
of life: sweet salt.  

Is it blight or providence 
to provide and prepare

the prophet her night 

through to morning? What is

it?  What does it mean to see 
from a dream a distance,

the length from the lens of cells, 
to those whose limbs can move
now only through plaster and lathes 

and then wake us up aching, dusty?  The girl 
who dreamed her brother dying
but didn't know it

was a dream of her brother
dying.  Is it hours after
the accident she notices?

Or is it the distance of summers
and the long suffocating
darks she charts?

Because only when it's all 
too far away is it a blur

she stops reaching for, 

a horn hassling the fog
on the shore, a picture paused
on the wall in the hall

or across the room at the funeral.
She can't see, even up close.
Or even, later, squeeze a memory 

from it.  There are too many.  

How is it we have any breath 
left at all? 

I mean think:

how still the children had to go
to die all those years ago, 
to pull off their glee as though

it were a disease, pull off that 
caul of thought, that pause of 
awe at being truly dead.

It’s so honest it's firefly brief, or a parasite

that bangs against brain
and come away concussed,

falls to the ground, and vomits.  

Like the mothers and fathers receiving
this news after the swirl of it set and jelled:

when they breathe some 
of the hot-tongue facts, words spontaneously

pause, levitate in the algae and be-

come now their other son
or daughter.  Imagine it, how news
like this becomes another

child, the only one left 
to hug around the neck, and no matter
how stiff it can't be choked

dead again.  It levitates above the bed
now and rubs the back
of their neck right at the point

where life jabs.  It makes them drop
everything and lie dumb

and openmouthed.  Breathe.

Breathe over that flat lake, late with the bob

of loons.  The men are long home 
from throwing their ropes. 

But it’s their throwing that’s unwipeable.
That undisputed God-pause 
of the hook hanging like nothing.

Thoughts without air.

As though they've been caught in a fabric
only dead things can see.  And, when ripped,
and words pour out, it's the beginning

of something altogether new
in their world.  It started
this way, the cauterizing of God's

chaos: His bladder
of the universe, torn open
on the whole community.

And stars come together because
of it to burn words shut.  They work for years doing
it.  They're still working on it: news

of boys and girls and aunts and sisters
dripping through.  And all the mothers who see 
but don’t say.  They can’t wipe their face

enough to wash all away.  Even
if they rubbed for a million
minutes, even though the blood

doesn't move, the cheeks sag
with the hold of it.  See?  Can you?
It's in the water.  It always has been.