Make Something

Excavate the clay from the beds of your eyes

to shape its crude skeleton.

Press its feet into sand so it stands rooted

wherever you find forgiving earth.

Use force

wherever you don’t.

Plunder grand tapestries crafted by greater men

for patches and scraps

to stitch the skin to its bones.

Command your creation

to rise.

If that fails (which it is bound to do)

use flattery and bribery and even deceit.

When you have nothing left in you,

kneel.

Press your lips to husk and stone

and pound its chest

until it creaks to life.

I don’t blame you

for limping back to your lover

who waits with a silver bowl brimming

in outstretched hands.

You ache for intoxication

and you imagine

once she is done pouring herself down your throat

she will oil your stiff shoulders

and bathe your eyes, so weary

from trying to fix your gaze on that hairline crack

in the horizon

where your promise gestates.

The mighty figure you see reflected

in that pool of her grasp

is hard to resist,

especially as she refills it again and again

and whispers that you belong there

that she will restore you

to the one thing she has known all along.

You are a marvel, limitless,

an everyday rarity.

You are a man.

She will give you sanctuary

For as long as it takes

But not a moment longer.

Don’t mistake the sustenance for the source.

No well is bottomless

And no woman’s hands can fight gravity

or the urge to scratch

her own itch.

Sip

long and deep.

Then turn your back and walk out the door.

Your love is not resting at the bottom of a bowl.

The golem you braved doubt to construct

awaits your transfusion.

Your place is there,

Animating

your next incarnation.

Take Cover

White shows through worn green veins

at the edges of the quilt on my bed.

It is a fragile relic meant for a museum

but the nothing weight is perfect for my skin,

thin petals of foxglove and hollyhock,

a breeze-bent gauze of pollen and light.

 

No one knows for sure

which great aunt or grandmother

held the needle between fingers

then nimble enough

to drive the needle straight

through miles of scrap

over the rough terrain of a century

all the way to me.

I curl beneath her offering.

A storm blows just outside the panes,

tossing limbs against the sky

as I tuck my own around my heart

and pull the quilt in tight

despite its brittle threads.

The Sioux cannot be blamed

for believing hand-stitched leather

could protect them in battle.

We cannot know the true nature of the threat

until the first time

and sometimes, not even then.

The ones who come before weave enchantments

into everything they leave

for progeny they may never meet

whose trials they can hardly imagine.

It is insufficient magic,

yet none more powerful exists.

We cannot be blamed

for wrapping ourselves in beautiful folly

on occasions

when the wind is fierce

and the night is long.