MAP

 

My little girl is learning to draw her world.

Rainbows, ships, bridges, monsters,

and waterfalls -- all of them executed

in bold strokes of color -- decorate

our walls, floors, and tabletops.

She draws me, her old man, with black stilts

for legs, a small cloud of chin whiskers,

and white balloon of a hand, five-pointed

like the sun, reaching for her own.

In another, the family has merged into

one great being, impossible to tell whose

outstretched hands belong to whom,

or whose feet are leading the way.

But today she gives to me a blank sheet

of paper, folded neatly in quarters.

"This is your map," she says calmly,

"so you will always know where you are."

I accept with the gratitude of the lost.

I treasure this one most of all.

GHOST IMAGE

 

My daughter unearths it from a stack of yellowing papers on the desk, that silly photo booth image of her parents, younger, turning to kiss; still half smiling, as the shutter clicks them permanently into the cool black and white usually reserved for historic artifacts, or great-grandparents, offering barely a passing glance at their secret worlds. It is the color of distance, and unforgiving detail. She laughs, holding it up to the light, someone's looping handwriting showing through the other side; looks at me, as if for explanation. I ask what she thinks, if it's funny to see her parents -- rarely in the same room for most of her life -- touching this way. "I like it," she says matter-of-factly. "But it's a ghost picture." I nod, and we both go back to whatever it was we were doing only a moment before.

GHAZAL ON FAILURE

 

I can't take credit for every one of my failures.

The best of my mistakes were not made on my own.

When the butcher puts down his blade, he is a Buddha;

but the poet without a pen is simply on their own.

Love's rough bargain offers the world and more;

all that it requires is everything you think you own.

Sleep thickens in the corners of the lover's room.

Even together, we bear the weight of years on our own.

The long shadow of rain crosses my brother's grave.

There is no Why, it repeats; you are on your own.

When I was a child, I could draw every world imagined;

It was no punishment to be left on my own.

Perhaps we grieve most that which never arrived,

a palpable absence that claims us as its own.

The anxieties of youth are lessened by those of age;

but the worst of our lives is not all that we own.

THE NAMELESS BIRD

 

So often we mistake beauty for the light behind it.

We know better, but it's one of our favorite lies.

We long for clarity, seen through the lens of unreason.

Love itself walks between, where all hope lies.

I don't know how the geese find their way back every year,

or what causes two lovers to agree upon the same lie.

These winter crows don't care to know your name;

but they recognize friend from foe, and they never lie.

The bird in your heart doesn't understand that it's caged.

It sings when spoken to, sleeps where its shadow lies.

Death wins the final argument; we understand this.

But that doesn't make the songs we sang suddenly lies.

It's true, brother, that I should visit more often than I do;

but the grave is not where any of our memories lie.

It's no use asking me who is living and who has gone.

If you want the truth, let me begin with this lie.

PASSING THROUGH

 

Have the dead grown tired of our endless retelling?

It's enough to pass through the gates of suffering once.

The absences pile up, fill the smallest windows with shadow;

so many ghosts demanding their place at once.

When I loved you, I spoke in fragments and innuendo.

It's too dangerous to speak of love all at once.

Some people have barely spoken their names, and leave.

My father was a curse my mother uttered only once.

Our youth exists only in the backward glance of song,

the words and melody of which came together only once.

I had no idea it would take a lifetime for one simple thought;

and yet, had I to do all over again, I would do so at once.

Some say that we die within each passing moment,

though we have lived a thousand lives being here once.

When the worst at last happens, we learn to breathe anew.

Like all else, the unimaginable happens only once.

HAUNTED HOUSE

 

Throughout the sweltering day at the fair,

strolling the miles of sticky, littered sidewalks,

air thick with the smell of August sweat,

beer, and sugar spun a hundred different ways,

my young daughter pleads repeatedly

to enter the dark gates of the haunted house.

She is drawn by the canned siren screams

piped through speakers perched on either side

of the cemetery's artificial grass, entranced

by the cool, gray tombstones hovering

above a shifting sea of mist, the thin limbs

of skeletons reaching up from below.

She wants nothing more than to be scared

out of her flesh, laughing all the while.

Each time we pass I must remind her that

the spooky castle, as she calls it, is meant only

for bigger kids, and each time I am met

with an exaggerated sigh of disappointment.

I do not speak of my own quiet fears,

the worst ones that eventually came true

or were erased by others more immediate,

ones that settled in like unwelcome squatters,

nudging one another to make room;

nor do I mention every terror that I hold

on her behalf, ones I cannot yet see, but sense

feeding on shadow, gathering strength.

One day she will turn away from my warnings.

One day I will have to let go just enough,

let the devils dance in their costumes

of flesh, and every mad beast around her roar;

one day I must trust the light within her

to repel every ghost yet to come.

TUNNEL OF LOVE

 

Were we so easily amused a mere hundred years ago? Was the achingly slow motion of these tiny painted boats crawling through the water a thrill worth paying for, while we sweated through our starched, buttoned shirts and summer wool, hands folded like sleeping birds in our laps? Was it somehow old, even when it was new, creaking as though every motion would be its last, the thinnest shafts of light breaking through its walls? No, you assure me, It's meant to be this slow, so slow that you hardly realize you're moving. It's meant to go nowhere, letting you out right where you came in. Look around. There's a reason it has the longest lines of anything else out here.