The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems

Debbi Brody: Santa Fe Soul Cento

54 debbI brodY Santa Fe Soul Cento He lights two candles, confuses a haunting and a blessing. I mourn having passed so quickly, grief a thread of blue tears, poison pitted plums. I couldn’t find the glass case for my heart, I pretend that what exists now is enough. Widowed birds talk all morning, with wings that of course represent time, a million particles of particulate, a field trip to the origins, a vault or someone’s dresser drawer. Wrap a blessing around your curse, it will travel further. The queen will undrown herself, become the hurricane. don’t speak of things no one can believe in on the corner of a heavy heart. spread wide, shaking the ground. Make the Mardi Gras small enough so it fits under the table, at rest where you began. Resist drowning altogether, light a candle. even your silence holds a sort of prayer. 55 We have been to many worlds, helped God get his work done, held our hands wide, able to live in a world of beauty. The bitter rosary has a beginning and an end, a fringe of vulgar silence. The sand makes music and yet my eyes don’t hear, my heart forms a new constellation. I imagine I am a camera, a moon that won’t forgive. We were burnt to a reusable equation, want things so simple we have complicated everything. Life is a truffle, banished to the kitchen, replete with redheaded women, whiplash of winter’s tantrums, the slow unrolling of another hot afternoon. I ate a handful of the wet earth, almost at the place where we began, fresh clothes and fresh starts, a sour prayer rocked endlessly on the naked promise of endangered time. 56 dissolve into wisps of unlived out longing, upside down ache, anchors of the useless. The cauldron boils with fish beneath the ice, a balm for left behind children undone inside a pomegranate. Contain yourself. If you see a person in this tableau, let me know. don’t go there, meaning is air.sit and wait for the inside color of the tree and the acorn. Go backwards everyday, put the ghost at ease, delicate hummingbirds washed down with single malt. The love of it has burgeoned beyond comprehension, as unseen as an unpredictable future. In death we are a scrim, a dark crane, caricatures of God, charcoal and wine, God will move to the outside, a prisoner studying socrates, another dawn orchestrating the east, a big mess to clean up. 57 Your own stories circle back, a certain measure of surrender. All stories are swelling and we can’t keep track of time so I will make it up for you. If you have a choice of two things and can’t decide, take both. Ground yourself in here, which is ragged and choking, wake in the night at the least sound, grow an extra hand to reach across, fall to the moon, like honey to the big dipper, unable to hold the moist thin syntax. don’t be afraid of being in the middle, promise to write about what is underneath. Living is like being suspended in a sphere, the entryway is not a meadow, but a crusted nest outside the door. The day flashes like a blade overhead, grinding luscious words into blue cornmeal. How many hours are falling out of time, charged with a fruit from a different world, a solar system riddled with fragrance, broken ideas in a pile, stars that look like friends? Iron is iron until it rusts, not a trap, just a bit of giving way, 58 a line of dark coffee rum. Cellos recognize the need to rust, immune to the fading of memory. stories are the opposite of gravity. Who will tell me anything as completely as you? Your blood runs like a river,a short walk in the dark, an inverse ripening of the soul. ...