Epiphany | A Literary Journal

April 2006

1
April is the
first poem too
young for cruelest

time I wrote when flowers
wrote rainbows wrote birds too
young for memory then and

now is only just today my
love is well come home

first daffodils forsythia flash
the old gray world with grade
school yellow, scilla grounds
it blue, one tulip’s red with yellow
pistil stamens still the same

Down the street from the green
school where lines form the red
school waits
My love checks
his blood now, wet rubies
on his fingers
Love lives
on what is lost, draws
blood, colors us in

Hawk got dove
today. Sharp-shinned
hawk. Mourning dove. Beside
the garden pulled feathers, plucked
down, pecked at entrails wet with
blood, ate, flew low with
what was left— bird
heavy with bird

Sudden snow dusts ground,
maples red with early flowers,

snow turned rain will bring them
down, wash blood from broken

bodies, push up and out
green, out hidden leaves

Tulip closed against
the cold,
snow bent it
down, made a smooth white
egg of it,
its own heat
broke it open red

with him my love better
now each day break but
days do not begin end
break have never been
break so much with any
one break since I break
I hold will not break

Fifteen years, thousands of
days, millions of minutes
since that April summer

day when I, my own
one as-long-as-we-both-
live Love, said yes. Yes I do.

Days before, He came to the city
named for peace, where there was, where
there is, temple or mosque, no peace, riding
an ass or the colt of an ass, riding on branches
or clothes strewn in His path—
But if the city
gates with different names, gates built on top of
gates, could lift their heads, if the stones,
bombed, refused, could rise together—

In the newly discovered good
news, the disciple named betrayer

is asked to sacrifice the man
that clothes the master: flesh

shed, not risen, death the good
gate to that which is no body

New seeds, green and red, female and male on one
tree, or meeting in air, buds like the buttons
that open the body—
But papery pale
beech leaves blaze the trail that leads
to the hill where just-dug graves—

12

tree gone willow
last winter fallen
taken stump hollow
hole now

and air where last
year vertical script
wrote early spring’s
green news

Last year lambs, panicked by our
traffic, ran under their mothers, we

ate them later, we love the humble,
we eat and drink at the wooden table,

but the lamb was before the slaughter
of thousands in Egypt, and now in Eden

thousands, and bombs for the next
country, they say, war, we love that too.

Traffic halts, trees bleed
seeds beside the road,
reddened air, sudden

clouds, Behold the time
is coming, or is it come
this holy day of death?

April’s more
red than green,
when I wrote at seven
the busy maple I didn’t know what
the maple was doing,
but now I’m fixed
on magnolia: rose bullets on one side
of this tree and opening open-
ing open on the other

But would one want
one’s body, made to make more
bodies, take, eat, heavy with bodies, would
one want one’s body back?
Enough
the empty tomb, shed clothes, the lily, its open-
ing throat, broken shell, out and into
air that molds itself to all this is

Back through all that was before
I could meet you on the corner

I wrote, a second “April,” another
you, but here we are, bodies not

the bodies they were, yours
healing, mine on hold, I thought

this would be for love, Love,
but it’s body. Love’s body.

hyacinths now, follow the scent, trees
white where they will be green, but
you walk more slowly now, and in
the woods we walk on what’s
fallen, we walk on rot

Fallen we say but in the war
movies we see it’s
bodies being

felled: in air

for a moment,
where, as if toward beds,
they fall back, breathless, taken

sweet showers cruelest month
lilacs last in green endures lines

drawn between the pale green leaves
dotting trees and the brown exposed

where there was snow, mixed, he said,
what we want with what we've had

Then, beneath the green cave, the red
room paled, I had no room, I wrote,
for anyone, was early done, but

you have opened a house, young
blood flushes my skin when come
sweet thoughts of your my body

Room in mind for body while
body rests, waits,
room in deeper
mind of dream for what’s denied,
not recognized,
room if we re-
cognize, know over again each
other, for you and me, two
all day in this one house

Trout lilies shooting through
dead leaves stamens stretching
red pistil pushing yellow
up—
You lying low then sitting
standing lying down again with me
all well again you are my spring

Nothing new in this green and
red, them and us, leaves sheer

like lingerie, deeper now, trees
crotched, deeper, roots—no,

we’re not, we cannot root or
rise, we’re crouched between

creeping phlox on an old
grave, someone’s still coming up
through the stems of these rooted green
others, our distant relatives that
rise, start over and over

Touch skin to touch
muscle move blood find
bone
to make blood
rise, blood held by veins
flesh skin
to meet dear
body flesh Love not in blood
shed but in that clear
rush to see through body

Trees finding greens, coloring in
out to the edges, skeletal shadows
becoming shade, landscape painting
as it erases itself—
our lessened
bodies learning each day to be
what they are becoming

Out, or coming out,
dogwood, white and pink lace,
bride and her maid, lilacs breaking
their dark knots—

We are out on this
safe street, while a war, not broken out
but being made, is making more wars

still blue through half-
green trees and you
beside me now
safe, but

what are those
pale bee-y things
paused hawk-
like in our path?

Heavy with memory, this, old
Aprils, self with self, my,

it, lilac with lilac
will not fly—

But body still moves
to body, like to like or almost

like, even now I am learning
love in the school of desire