Luggage, and: Terra Incognita

Luggage

Another jet's incision, a fire-blue sky,
another giant branch broken by the snow,
another thing I never said to him,
the sun of the heart crowning the horizon,

Another hour, another souvenir,
an arm of ice attaching to our window,
and us here at the funeral feast
moving slow up the ladders of our ribs
to lift our heads and look,

to slip it in, the scarred world,
how it unclips its billowy laundry, folds it
into the eye, the skull, the heaven
we watch like someone else's luggage,
someone who got lost along the way,

whose black bag circles the carousel
as if to say, go ahead, take me,
I'm no one's if not yours now,
kneel down and grab my battered handle,
break the endless circle that I'm in.

Terra Incognita

Then I look up to break
the spell of another history,
my eyes sore, near at hand

a shanty skyline of books,
pens, encrypted margins,
a flock of sheaves, the dish

on my desk for our one deaf cat,
everywhere the flotsam
of ledgers and bad maps

however earnest, the unknown
seas to the farthest west
boiling with enormous snakes,

all the shadow-feathered
highlands and blue threads
mingling there as I lay

down my heavy volume,
set it on its face, a winged
creature locked in flight.

So many names tonight
crowned in blood and rubies
and God knows what . . . and me

with my lamp boring a small
dim hole into early hours
as if I were a prisoner of hours,

as if the still room swept
into emptiness and back
like an iron bell without a clapper.

So many stories like roads
that wear the language of flowers
that never bloom there.

And as I snap off the lamp,
as an animal starlight clouds the glass,
the kitchen path invites

again the body in need,
each soft step long rehearsed,
each print beneath my feet

dissolving: tell me something,
I say to myself, make me
a place for the mind to lie in.

And the dark opens its palms,
its two black pages wet
and gleaming, a book of water

welling up with my father's
withered face; tell me, I say,
is there anyone there

at the bottom of the ocean.
And the face looks long and hard
from its mirror, an island

without tree or native tongue,
sand-white, then slowly sinking,
the socket of each eye filling up

with ink, hollow as a mouth.
And that is all. Which is when
a certain lightness comes

over me, unlikely as it seems,
as if I were sailing down
the edge of a cubical planet

into neither world nor sky,
deaf, sure, as any book,
any face harbored in the nameless

waters, any distant father's life
looking back, reading me.
A lie, I admit. Or something more

ambiguous. Unhistorical, at best,
like an ancient map I love:
this sense of someone watching

through the black lens of unlived
hours. Read, read. Here lies
monsters, says the map. And then

a stillness. And the dark leans in
to kiss my eyes, to put out the tiny
lantern swinging in my head.