new zealand poems: shifting seasons

Unlearned habits speak for themselves in our bodies

As we work, as we fuck, as we eat.

Come learn a universal language, come speak it

With me so we might hear your voice in the eternal song—

It becomes so much more.

This is a dream of the mind body plunge, first of its kind

Kind politicians pleading a case for spirituality

Against nothing, but within within within.

Are you the religious kind? Are you seeking comfort?

My father told me a 20 year old is firing him

On his birthday.  His body never looked so much like mine

As climbing out of the freezing water. We were mourning something

And celebrating it too. I am searching for the door--

A way in, ancient language counting points

Of light, only to find myself in a room of runes

Carved by one hand, or holding out my hands

To the walls and finding a way in—

Is it cultish the demand for new central living?

Is it cathedral reclusiveness?

How does one live a life devoted to that which is most holy?

The droids are bending their knees to the trees now,

And our Marxist eye is robed in light, is singing

“the necessities of life will come to you.”

The hearkeners, the beckoners, they are here

In the long ripples, they are not forever

Nor do they know it in their supine positions

With heads shaved. But that which has not been is coming.

Where will I catch it, in the pine barrens

Or by the barren Baltimore coast? In the unseasonal

Heat of los angeles or in the brass reflections of new Orleans?

Or will I make the novel? Or will it come to the rituals of my forefathers?

My grandmother’s tallit covers my shoulders with silver images of Jerusalem.

The kipa fills my limbs with stiffness. I am a white bird in the migration

with ice caps melting and poles shifting

And I do not know where my body knows where to go.

This is the unveiling. This is the snow turning into spring.

This is the covering. This is the light filling leaves with death.

I am fiddling with the keys to her apartment, with my car doubleparked

In front. Always the goal was to be like a stone, like a tree,

Like a river. But has it gotten closer? Jake is dead and the dead

Do not play any music. Here are some goodbyes. They renew

Themselves like vows. Perhaps it grows like that,

In furrows that change the earth. In drunken texts and decisions

Which hold one part in particular up to the light,

At least for a little while. I am keeping the plants alive,

But I have too much stuff to move and stay the same.

I think I’ll trust my hands even if I cannot know the mask

That turns away from me. In the twilight of summer here,

Asking the one I love to change, I know

I am leaving this world perhaps forever, and noone

Is making me go. But what,

What are we going to do?