My daughter sees a hawk feather on the road.
Just as I pick it up the wind picks up the face of the leaves.
Just as I raise it to the air the trees begin sharing ancestral words.
Just as I pass it to my daughter she’s falling from the upper world.
Just as she takes it from my hand I am falling.
Just as she offers it back to her father she is falling.
Such things are found on the road joining young and old.
Such things happen on the spirit road.
Month: November 2015
Shadow Line
At the shadow line the storm’s grip is loosed,
Between a sea of light and a sea of darkness
It is beautiful and hallowed on both sides.
Rain falls from the sun and clouds glow.
Winds blow in place and yet we are moving
As though at the equinox of eternity.
At the shadow line is the peace of mountains.
At the shadow line it is the birthday of forever,
It is the anniversary of fire and night,
Sparks fly from the anvil
But the hammer sounds in the distance.
Truth Enough
Last night I dreamt I was talking to Wittgenstein. It was a frightening dream, hyperreal; and later I thought, not only relevant but important to share. I was wearing a blood soaked apron, as apparently we were both doctors in a First World War field hospital somewhere near the front. I marveled at his remarkable sangfroid under fire. I was about to make the first incision into my patient when I saw that it was a young boar and then a fatted calf. “Truth is truth enough for a grain of sand to keep the earth from falling,” he said, while amputating the right arm of his own brother.
Composition in Gray
November, you are the urn of the seasons,
All other months are ash inside you–
Body without light, spirit-haunted.
Our waking hours
Resemble more a rainy dream,
Our dreaming, the mist of another life.
I hear an oboe in November,
An oboe drifting through the woods,
Accompanied by strings.
Are not those cellos and violins
Our desires dying even as they desire more life?
From the river a freighter’s foghorn
Throbs in the night.
The rumbling of a distant train
Beats drum rolls for the dead of November.
I dream them in gray.
Along the river’s mist I see the dead,
And then I see her
Who was once naked beside me.
How ashen her beautiful face,
How dead those eyes I knew.
She holds out a cold hand.
I step through to the other side.
Chapel of the Little Flower
You can’t see it from the street
But Chapel of the Little Flower saves Detroit.
When the street burns– it anoints with ashes.
When the street is hungry– it feeds the street.
The homeless sing outside its doors
And the song carries up the alley
Like the flight of birds.
Narco Corrido
Children want to be narco.
They see money and power.
Children play in the street,
Dirt stains their feet,
Body covered by a sheet.
A convoy of Escalades,
Narcos in masks with AK-47s.
Children play in the street,
The wrong dream soils their feet,
Body covered by a sheet.
A narcobloqueo playground
For Death and Chaparrines.
An old man washes the blood
Of children from the street.
He looks like Jesus Malverde
With a crown of smoke.
Pray to Santa Muerte,
Save them from the Devil.
Children play in the street,
Death stains their feet,
Body covered by a sheet.
Salvatore Ala 