For the grace of fingers that could not grasp edges, corners, or anchors. For hands that were too wet to bridge the chasm of inches or rope. For the wrist and its bending digits, for the drowned infants who floated like wood past the dark hulls of their mothers’ bodies.
For the days-old corpses of women and men whose wheelchairs became graves. For children who were too shocked to speak their identities; for the ghosts of their voices that haunt the flag to which they were taught to pledge allegiance.
For the rainbows that assembled in their waters diseased with gasoline and blood. For the voices whose rage thundered like thunder inside the stadium because they refused the musky death of animals.
For the men who fired guns at helicopters that passed over their own nearly submerged heads. Over and over the blades whirred promises of water and bread and help while mothers and daughters, brothers and fathers drowned, their lives devoured by neglect.
Lives gave up on the living and floated to dark, drier islands. Torrents rose over broken levees. Dead cattle bobbed along interstates. Highways unfurled into ribbons and graves. The President remained on vacation. The Secretary of State shopped for shoes.
For Charmaine Neville who commandeered down Canal Street while storefronts shattered and bodies were raped. Helpless fists pounded the bus window like bullets. For the junkies who needed something stronger than death or a dream to placate their addictions. For the residents who refused to abandon the corpse of New Orleans.
For a husband who could not save his entire family because he only had two hands. For their house split in half by water. For his wife’s last words: you can’t hold on and hold me. For the absence of God as she dropped his hands and gave herself like a petal to the gulf.
For her son who understood, as he climbed onto the roof by the help of two trembling hands, that his father, only a man and not a god, could not save his mother’s life from something as inexplicable as water. Published in Callaloo, Volume 29 Number 4 Copyright 2007 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Wake for Memory
The full room
Dead mouths
In the hour where first words circle the crows
Before the pillow burns with silence
The vase of flowers keeps its body still –
still
it’s a moving line when the lights of a lost car float
upon the clean walls – the moon drops and rises far beyond
the last of white things –
dreams speed up
Near the garden’s walls the feral tail unfurls
a moan curls into the moon’s tear
before memory’s dead mouth is sewn up
Published in Boxcar Poetry Review
www.boxcarpoetry.com
Copyright 2007 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
| Turn of Heaven |
I saw them last Angels, with wings folded Their buttocks white and tan Eyes closed above tongues about them was a flight. Blur, I remembered trying but more languorous. The prodigious My eyes were open until all of their shadows From what forest had they darted, in thirst, Our skin a sibling hue. Texture of will be more than water.
|
-after Yusef Komunyakaa’s Ode To The Drum
Gazelle, you are mine. Your corpse
is pounded into me like music. We shift
chords in this clear pool of brine & blood. The tears
curve like sharp fish ribs; the drum
under your heart is now an orchestra
of birds. Your faces, ebony, brass, amber
& gold, I kiss. Bones slide down in the white
porcelain tub. You leap from the hunter,
your neck cocked to the hammer, the cry
inside your mouth like a soaring horn
freed from the trunk of a white tree.
O animal heart, I am you
this evening. Green water
makes the hide soft & rutted, mute
brown throat of a river. Gazelle,
my drum, you cannot die. I want to be
more useful than memory, after
the body is bathed with vinegar
in death. I want to be more ancient
than language & hands. Nothing kills
the drum after the skin begins its new life
as a song. Yes, we were once
animals. We cannot die twice.
Copyright 2007 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Some days I go to Saint Monica’s
and touch the pews: I cannot pray
to wood. Instead I watch the old
women who have outlived you.
I study their wrinkled hands, hues
of liver spots, the wedding
rings slipping around their knuckles.
I pray for absence before my body
will betray me: brief cathedral of miracle.
I study calendars while I sit in the pews
counting the empty boxes. The perfect empty
days are vacant coffins, the comfort
of numbers like condolences. I do not live
by calendars anymore. My own time is the passing
of light, dream and love over my face, saltwater
drenching a rock. At the repast, I held your remains,
the box less than ten pounds, as though you were again
an infant. The royal blue velvet softened the hard
corners of the urn. I imagined the once beating heart, no more
than a pound while you lived.
Tell me you are dead. Declare it
a certainty. So that, in my dreams and days
and daily routes, I will not pause and call
for you. I will worship the grocery store,
the cathedral, the yellow café, and the park,
not stopping for ghosts who, over and over,
call out your name.
Published in Harpur Palate, Volume 5 Issue 2
Copyright 2007 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
And as the afternoon light slides
into water, so too does your tongue lantern
my body into luminosity. The evening torch
fills the lip of an orchard, cradling lonely human breath
as our ripe mouths open in the sun’s loneliness.
The night that presses closer to the darkened fields
of our bodies is nothing, nothing and I am more alone.
Copyright 2007 by Rachel Eliza Griffiths