fig. 1: Like richness piling inward; life unto yourself.
I was in church eating eggs off my lap while this guy was watching. But he couldn’t smell them, buttery—that was just for me.

fig. 2: Like how a hand can only touch you one place at a time.
I wanted to bury a knife in the sidewalk. Instead, I walked to the hillside and dug up the freshest roots I could find. There is no good time to save; no such season as shortage.

fig. 3: Like recovery.
I peed my pants in my own bedroom. Puddled on the wood floor. I couldn’t stop it, I was curious. I had to pee so bad I was mostly relieved. It wasn’t difficult to clean up.

fig. 4: Like being perforated.
We sat under a tarp that seemed to draw its breath with the wind. It pressed up against branches, trying to stay longer, then sagged a darker blue. He gave me his number. Bless him, his voice tremors of bravery, a tantrum folded in his hand.

fig. 5: Like it’s the first time.
I woke up pealing your bell.

In fifth grade we hung around after school to play Sumo. We’d stuff the tetherball under a sweatshirt and charge ‘til the rope snatched us back. Cuffed by the invisible clothesline. Invisible is soft, I remember thinking, while my stomach scaled my ribs.

Now that it’s allowed, my love’s going every which way. And each way whole, like a tetherball sailing hard and light. I feel that small and hilarious, now. I want knock you over with my belly, painfully and in short range. But of course you’re all a step too far and I’m just wrapping myself to a pole.

There are four of you. I had to count. There is one other, possibly, and then all of you who already know it anyway. I am giving it boundlessly. Not recklessly, but if you’d let me. It’s why I keep coffee, wine and chocolate on my nightstand.

I feel expensive, fat with unanswered love. My solitude high-ceilinged and furnished. I take delicious self-portraits, now, like a saint. Not like the years in cloth and pen.

And what’s courage? I would’ve said devotion, and now I suppose I would, too. It’s in me still, charging it’s slack.

As a kid, certain books (Jane Eyre, A Little Princess, Little Women, Girl of the Limberlost, The BFG, The Oz series, etc.) appeared and swallowed me whole, whales to my Jonah. I sat in the ribs’ corridor without a match, listening to blood course through the fish. But The Good Book was something else.

I was raised on the B-i-b-l-e and, when spit up by the whale, I happily wandered its blistering shores. With my family, in church study groups, or alone in my room, I rarely approached another book with the same eager, meditative diligence.

The Bible was always pre-parsed, each word a geode waiting to be cracked. We read verse by numbered verse, absurdly auditing every phrase. This was my education in semantics, and how I came to love the study of signs and meaning. I can't help but wonder how this early, intense study has shaped the way I read and interpret, well...everything else.

I'm grateful for my time spent poring over scripture. Despite my church’s fundamentalist leanings, I was allowed to speculate. When we gathered in a circle and discussed how Deuteronomy might apply to daily life, it was with the awed conviction that the Bible was a living, breathing thing; as much about our voices as its printed word. And we took it slow because, after all, it would be with us the rest of our lives.

I’m not sure when I last read the Bible. It’s weird what’s lodged in my mind, and all that’s passed through the sieve. This is the longest passage I can remember off the top of my head:

…in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, for this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you can test and [something something] what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

This was my favorite verse for years, which I had to look up just now:

I am still confident of this:
I will see the goodness of the LORD
in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart
and wait for the LORD.

What must it all sound like to other people?! Strangely, only through regarding the Bible as fact, or truth, can one truly interact with it as a poem (I think). Susan Stewart suggests that we receive poems the way we receive promises,

...in the sense not of something scripted or repeatable but of something that "happens," that "occurs" as an event and can be continually called on, called to mind, in the unfolding present.

Isn't that how we saw the Word, as one giant promise? Yet the one receiving doesn't always feel satisfied. A "believer," laying her whole self before the text, may sense the imbalance Stewart acknowledges in poetry; that "what goes out overwhelms what comes back." For me, scripture was like so much fruit surrounding the stone. But what happens when the stone dissolves?

I don't miss reading the Bible; this isn't about that. Basically, I've been trying to understand my preference for the phrase or caesura over chapter or prose. Recently I thought, Maybe it's because I was taught to value the verse so much. As in, the Bible's arbitrary meter. Oversimplification?

Of course, the psalms and epistles did more to me than that. When I say the Bible taught me to read, I mean it taught me to trust fictions. Implicitly. It taught me to make story my most intimate authority. And, like a poem, it's shortcomings shaped me, too. To paraphrase something else Stewart said, we begin to create when we feel estranged. Each biblical failure to answer my pre-and-post-adolescent questions allowed me to do some meaning-making of my own.

(((Three poems inspired by remembered places in time)))

Daphne's room, SL

could feed off that

month for years,

the time spent

sleeping in her bed

batting at nets,

or the five

minutes running

on a low wall

just above the afternoon

flood (a broth;

a carcass settling

in the pot.)

.

.

Parks

there are bells

tied to everyone's laces. everyone walks

lightly, so the short high ring

is heard as low coughing,

and torn bark (rotten

slabs of bread).

and the dark comes fast

in the park, where blades nestle

in branches, and the heaviest

squirrel (god; king) flicks his tail

like a clean sheet, spreading

it over the earth.

.

.

School dance

Late, when she’s tired and got two fingers

saddled in his breast pocket,

they return each other’s weight at the hips

and sway only as much --

the next one out to watch

each other across the floor,

feeling gently unfolded, or cast

like spooled ribbon ‘cross the space.

The silk tongue running out --

Before, a few of them decorated,

finished early and hungry

and dressed. And one might've gone

to the window and wonder how much air

to let in, how much wind it’s taking

to bend it.

Where is Waldo?

I know the strategy. Keep the colors of the crowd varied yet repeating, so the page washes gently together.  Place Waldo in a clearing, right out in the relative open. Then, while you're bogged down in details--your eye sliding down the limbs of a dog pile, peeking under bleachers and between the legs of clustered cheerleaders--Waldo ambles by, fat chin in the air, and vanishes.

He never stops for a story. He is a tourist, not one of these self-reflective participant-observers trying to brush shoulders with The People. What you've gotta do is hold the page at arms' length, blur your eyes, and look for the clearings. It's a lot easier than Magic Eye, which is impossible.

Using this simple method, I guarantee you can find Waldo in 3 seconds (tops) every time. His world tour will zip by like a breezy, well-edited slide show.

Take, for example, his recent trip to--or, rather, through--landlocked Laos. He skirted foothills and traced rivers, setting wilderness between himself and the urban throngs. I unfocused my eyes and there he was, wetting his ankles in a paddy field, leaving a modest wake. Where indeed.

I called to him. I called loud and clear, punctuating 'Wal' and 'do'; thrusting through their voiceless consonants. Maybe the word sounded native, because he paid no attention. He kept grinning with that terrible face.

I don't think he has anything worth looking at in that backpack. A man like him has destroyed all appreciation for a 'good read'. No use for escape and no keepsakes. He thrusts his hand through the flap without lowering his chin and pulls out a neatly bundled change of socks. He has never held a ticket.

One thing I believe he could do is dance. He'd be the perfect student of modern, or jazz--never overthinking-or-trying. He might be a bit wooden, but so certain of limb that you'd wonder if we just couldn't recognize true grace.

You'd recognize him if you saw him. Then again, you probably saw him and just didn't know.