Ghost Gear: Poems

Sacrament

SACRAMENT You claim this is your earliest memory: the day they brought me home, head matted with doll’s hair, eyes puckered against the light of the new world—you, my sister, and they, our mother and father, baptized in the weeks following birth, touched, they say, by mercy. Unforgiven, I tutored myself in the ways of sacrament, slipping through neighbors’ windows, curious which gods or devils would rise from the basement foundations, or palming from our father’s dresser the .22 rifle rounds I claw-hammered open to powder the bomb that panged the tree-frogged dark into silence. Perhaps it was sleeplessness, perhaps it was the romance of streetlights: folding my nightclothes neatly on the bed, I slinked alley to alley, a pale specter just visible beyond the oak-line. Now, just home for the holidays, when my breath mists my bedroom window, a fog blossoms across the garden wild with sumac and turkey claw grass—this the story of my beginning, that fabled heat radiating down from the July sun, a snicker of sunlight between the bodies 12 of my makers—this the story of my conception and I seeking some way to tell it. So why not somewhere down in the garden by the alley we grew up on? Why not our mother and father coupling in a row of tasseled corn, the human fires rising between them? When we talk about my first days, you remember you refused to leave my side, curled beneath my crib like a nautilus sent singing from the waves to rock me in the arms of my first earthly sleep. If only I could sing the songs you sang to me then. If only I could sing them here, twisting in the iridescent turns of the Siamese fighting fish in its scummed fishbowl. O sister of earth, O sister of night, let’s stay awhile, roosted in this hereplace deep in the body of our makers. O sister of vesper, O sister of shadow, I still believe it was you who instructed me in the ways of waiting to be born, you who told me Child, fear not, harsh truths are first translated into whispers. You who said Child, call out if ever you are lost and we will call back, so I dropped, wailing as I came from the house of all souls. 13 ...