For the Ophelias
Are you one who beats her heart
With fists of rosemarys plucked
from your battered chest now
crushed in fragrant shards by
the throbbing, moaning,
ruing refrain
And will he not come again?
And will he not come again?
Oh rose of May,
You pommel the fresh-soiled wound
where your lover stabbed through your father’s heart
into yours.
Are you one who entwines grief in a wreath,
Haloing your pocked mind with crow-flowers,
Nettles, and those long purples—dead man’s fingers—
Nudging through your hair, garlanding your thoughts
with death and beauty?
Oh sweet Ophelias,
Who go down-a-down-a,
to the waters where your rosemarys will drown-a,
your bodies buried under the water are a stillborn
baptism, nothing can rise
when you breathe only tears.
Oh fair sisters, beat, beat your heart,
and mine beats with you.
Hear my minor, tremolo antiphony
In your ear, under your neck, arching
your back like a petal finding the sun,
unfurling your lilting
melody that will play on.
The Greek Dance
inspired by a Greek Orthodox festival
At the first note, the women open their hands,
not in the way one would extend a hand for shaking
but with fingers curved and palms lifted
like the Christ in their Orthodox paintings.
As one, the women shift—step, cross, bend, leap—
and I lose the single movement in the whole
round and round circling of synchronized soles
before the open arch of swaying incense.
One oiled woman with tight black curls—
her knees alternately bowing and leaping—
has muscles seasoned taut from the dance.
Her face steadies with eyes near and beyond, as though
she sees the inner self in the circle of selves to be true.
I find myself lilting toward the rhythm, crossing
my feet, falling into the circle with splayed fingers.
“Blessed be He!” I cry out with them
and realize we have said nothing, only moved
words with tripping ankles and clotted hands.
The dancer’s ear leans into my voice,
and when her outer eye fixes on mine,
I awaken to the knowing that surety is born
of imperfection and self-doubt.
I do not know the steps, but when her fingers lightly drip
mirth onto my shoulder, I draw in,
and begin to know myself in the Kalamatianós.
A Birth of Blackbirds at Twilight
View from an airport window
7:21
The clouds huff gray until their water breaks
and a flurry of dark enters the day’s birth canal.
8:15
The heavens bleed rows of pulsing crimson
like furrowed fields of fire.
8:59
Into the sky’s burning womb,
the infant comes
all at once
a vortex of birds
swing
between sky and earth,
innumerable wings expanding
and contracting
like one body,
a black funnel
spiraling to earth
then raising their dark self
to awaken the night.
9:00
A few of us closed the eyelids
of our little screens to pray
with our eyes open.