All Mothers are Boats

 

All Mothers are Boats by Herbert Kearney

All Mothers are Boats 

-For Herbie Kearney

i.

Yes, and we stood four mothers 

In each direction tending the fire on the levee

Enclosed by stones set heavy

By one who loves you & gathered

Us to say good bye, howling

To the skies, rent by time 

You flew from us, twenty seven minutes, she says 

While she waited down the hall, machines silencing 

Angel number of compassion, “for god damn

Humanity” you’d say, is what it burns down to

Our hearts flung open by breaking 

The measure of any line is who is listening 

Benevolent light you called them, as they danced

Near you, ejected from the sensory deprivation tank 

You built - “a failed experiment” —naked and trembling, babe

Trying in one life to give birth continuously, and to know 

It is the work that matters

That the work will get done 

ii.

the shores we arrive upon are always strange

yet feel familiar, edge of water to land

beyond death you speak, let go of hope & hold

on to faith—this ship of the dead 

you gifted us, oh, we have gathered there for years

& said good bye to love that leaves too soon, & now, now

dreamer— we sing for you

                          shorn of suffering     new born 

    the truth that even temporary         the spark created here shifts

           the whole plane of manifested life    

                            the work we do alone is us 

                                            & trembles through the universe

                                            & none of us, none of us leave

           this threading 

                             without shaping the whole net   

 

Ghost Birthdays

 Ghost Birthdays

For Dylan Burns, 1985-2014

No matter what it is, there is nothing that cannot be done.

-The Book of the Samurai

you are waiting in a field

you don’t know who you are waiting for

but you know 

   when they arrive   the wholeness of your life

         will bloom

 

let me tell you what i’ve collected here: suicide

      is not the choice to die

but the power to shape the days of those who love

you, in ways irreparable

& what we take from abandon 

            lives on in us 

 

the weight of the world is grief 

       we cart around 

                                       loose nets of drawn time, we dip in 

cast as stars across the universe

         to sing sibling 

from the crux of design  the threads that carry 

 

us                never far 

 

travel inside the auto carriers of traversed city, my love, for

ever is a word we pull up on the tongue without context

 

so much here convinces you to survive you must be hard 

but this softness of our feral hearts, that drumming sound

ancient as the rock that floats us, this creature aspect 

of open your palm and grasp what is given 

this is how you swim

the length of any river in your passing: you take in

and you take in, the light bouncing off the surface blinding

& you, a miracle told into the story, without end 

Time is Always the Crossroad

in 15 days my brother dies again, time is illusory

disasters shape language, once we were water line 

now we are abandon of a season that shapes our survive

in 15 days, the city will be lost of traditions that float us shore

to shore, we who thrive in the chaos of undone for each day numbered

a costume, a song, the way we arrive at the river in droves and will 

you play for me, will you dance with me, have you ever hungered so much 

in your life for a city as i have hungered for her to be reborn, repeatedly

in 15 days we take the shape of mourning, i don’t know everything suicide 

can do yet, i don’t know everything loss can be, i don’t know if holding ‘

together is a possibility, but here we go out on this lonely flight of what else 

can we drop into those waters, palms painted morning light & for every death, 

some life clings to us, or else we would have to admit we can’t see 

at all. Can we admit it? Can we convince grief that timing matters, or is it true 

every song cannot be unsung, so deep in the threading, is the walk we take at dawn

from the house to the river, and my brother will be there walking from our mother’s house 

to our father’s where he will get the gun, will you lay me down to sleep, for every walking 

wake we keep, i am never alone now. Ever i am with you in time, we travel doubly bound 

find me near the shore on the morning of no Mardi Gras and i will show you how it looks  

to carry all of it, angel of break, to poet is to never heal completely, for i would hold 

until there is no shape, till the burns of time erase, the flood inside me sharp with learning 

in 15 days, ask me what it means to crossroad these deepest pains, for that too we sing. 

Echo of Lost

 time is a feature of our minds

at each moment, we are at the edge of a paradise

called now, nothing can be in two places

the mind projects motion in what is a series of still caughts

what we think of as love, continuous

is error in observation: given enough time

maximum entropy will occur 

it was no matter that you could never be straight

with me, could never tell me the truth of what you felt

could never say to me any sweetness in this hard, hard life

for what i imagine is everything, is more that what you could

offer, is more than what could ever exist

and inside the dreaming of the dream, it falters

to eclipse us, order is a rare phenomena falling around us

there was no before or after in this scene

it is ever lasting, i was closed my eyes against loss

i was shut down to when you left me standing 

here alone 

Serpah less Listen

"I am your loved one, lost from eternity" 

-D. di Prima

 

ever aloud saying imagine would you

opening wider hearing it they

city they lived tried so i 

sings she ride will you

ever answer, cannot type that love

abandon share will you sorrow 

algae the surface settle we need

little very beauty rely very here 

know it, do of we course breaking 

directly look won't & need

control blows chain of is it

miracles am i talk 

wanting of long it comes birthing 

hard worth desire story 

ripped & not it continue to life

longing another us unfurled

make stuns emerge 

one who thing i so 

a that into us 

girl, recall i was

a woman you make 

 

Severed of Timing

 

severed of hope is there's more of you

severed of delusion, & i am [un]-ground-

i'd rather make art between us than other shapes of control

madness called down so fine, the line trembles

to be quantum fixt is a code of reunions, i architect

into the code with a precision of science to sound

and what you hashtag makes it real, for here we live 

inside a doming, a light broken as horizons

broken of bird song

god is a woman asleep in the bathtub, dreaming 

do we have to know what we are creating

what's the poem about. there's no

poem here. look at the outline 

of make and tell me, you can't hear 

how reality is snapping 

we became beasted, two sets of eyes 

for every seeing, two sets of mind

so one stays afloat

one of us shores

equipped of light and browsing 

pages of directions

what's an echo in an isolated chamber

but retreaded as indentations 

deep enough to hold memory 

if all love is the same 

than all death must be the same

could you be simply here

you can become so untethere

we chimed in, a charm of not 

as if not loving me could ever be 

as dangerous as if you did

and then what we don't know we don't know yet

half as deadly as what we think we know 

that is actually unknowable

i am certainly dead & what shall be
made of it, if we no longer fear time 

what makes it matter

Bite Down Hard

i imagine we ship off

imagine we stow away 

i imagine the barges come and go on the river

we stalk around undetected

we slippery rats among the rocks

our tails a dead giveaway 

that we are alive still

searching borders broken 

i imagine i held my finger 

 

to your mouth 

& you bite down hard enough

to draw blood

i am a feeding to you 

 

i never wanted to be rescued

but devoured. like any proper

woman i would you let me know

you love me 

by removing my eyes, my tongue, ears

cut off my hands and leave me

senseless

i will know then i am one

of the adored

one of the precious

one of the salivated for by the masses

put one part of me on social media and with 

enough likes, i become a real girl

a real girl, they said, oh yes

everyone knows if you want to be worth anything

you have to have followers and likes 

enough to fill your days

that's what life is really worth dying for 

 

what else could make us the inverse

of god 

Travel this Devastation

they say we want to see the way others do but it's a lie we keep telling. we don't want to hold a[n] [other's] sorrow. don't want to know what the dead eyes collect. oh even now, this is a wrong headed way of saying a lot of nothing. of evidence to suspend care. the world is loops and swirls, the edge dusted to experience: come round so often, i forget the calling of it. here we again, here we forever. can you say with any certainty what the mind is supposed to be doing. what does it look like in a breaking. to be on both sides. to be so saddled with arranging, i can not comply with the hours of every dayness. i was slipping to the farthest reach. i was somewhere between and half remembered. why not even words could carry. i was so lazy now i will say just about anything to make you disappear.

universes that spindle, i was dead

a long time before i came here

i architect these walls to keep 

you would a life    hand you down

i stay masked under, you get her in a well

you sit a good, long spell

i'm going to speak to you over the headset only 

you'll have to forget everything you are to listen 

it's natural to wince/ it's brave to keep looking 

all the best parts of living round a little dying 

perfect in this turning 

who keeps time   now

who is keeping time 

my love for you turned gentle, i didn't want to be undone by it either, just stay awhile & i'll keep the sound low, the lights down low, the way my heart longs for you to hold, low. yes, even my wanting i can turn down the volume so low now it won't disturb nothing. 

 

 there were a lot of hours spent cataloguing excuse

what will we explain. 

once upon a time there was a reason 

for writing

 

 

 

 

The Mantra of Avalokiteshvara

OM MANI PADME HUM

“the jewel of the lotus is in the heart consciousness”

OM: represents generosity/ purifies pride/ ego, color is white/ trait is wisdom

Do you remember the number of beliefs you let go as you grew older and began to organize the world around systems not of your choosing?  The most interesting aspect of choice is not that we can choose, but from where do we believe we make choices. What I’ve learned most in the last year is the number of ways I reorganized my world to match the world around me like medical text books where the transparent layer of the body is laid upon a foundational mapping lining up the circuitry: Nerves, muscles, skeleton.   I tried to lay down in the outline assigned to me and keep within the parameters which I read as a type of safe, which I let fear read to me as a type of safe. I never understood why I was a poet, but poet is another four letter word that can hold you.

SANSKRIT HAS 96 WORDS FOR LOVE

I was writing a book about attachment and romantic love, and for some reason it wasn’t evolving: There is a bottom to grief, but how to not land there permanently.  I was meditating daily and doing yoga nidra and for some reason signed on to do a Reiki 1 training class. At some point when suffering, you hit a point where you submit because you have nothing else to lose. I learned this at 25 in rehab in one sphere and again at 39. Life spirals as much as we attempt to linear it. After my first Reiki training, I weaned off of antidepressants that I had been taking for over a decade for suicidal depression. This isn’t about medication or mental illness as much as it is a story about how patterns can be traced. For six weeks after Reiki 1, we were encouraged to meditate, chant, cut cords and practice self Reiki at least once if not twice a day. Thanksgiving fell shortly after I completed training, and I spent the day alone writing and meditating. As I sat at the table, this poem came out of me changing the whole shape of the book. After I wrote it, my entire body broke out in a damp sweat, and I was sobbing hysterically. Sometimes, we hold things inside of us. I say sometimes but what I mean is all times. All times we hold inside of us what we barely know.

break against

image of my brother’s head blown to bits

way a skull can’t contain what we are

way bones splinter and fragment

like a stone covered in cuneiform

speaks to us across time, how you will save yourself

heart’s seat, indestructible drop

how quickly you flew from us, birded

skull threaded in a womb where I too was threaded

lacuna in a life sentence

and then here too, firstly to step beyond this veil

and hold us as we come along

back & forth: souls

crossing near enough to touch

when you look into that book, can you read

what is written, can you see

last time I saw you

my anger kept me from speaking

I am lost, can you find me

I can’t tell whose grief

there is so much illusion

how can I ever hook you

I did not love you well in this world

my brother I did not know how to love

and I do not know why I can forgive you anything

but I cannot forgive myself

MA: represents ethics/ purifies jealousy/ color is green/ trait is compassion

Because I was writing about attachment, I tried an experiment of sleeping with strangers to observe how I attached to other people. I watch myself sometimes make these decisions cloaked in the veil of “art,” and I marvel at the fiction of safe it provides. I told myself I was doing this Reiki stuff in the same vein: Learning a new skill for writing my book. See how we slip accountability. I invited a man over I had never met and after we had sex, he told me suddenly that his mom had committed suicide and he found the body. He told me she had taken drugs he kept in the house, and it was his fault. What I haven’t told you yet reader is what I am. I call myself a poet.   

The BHAGAVAD GITA is a love story told on a battlefield; for how else does one approach questions of faith?

When I was younger, I could see clearly into people. I grew up in a house of secrets where the adults said one thing but the truth was different: I learned there are two worlds, the world said out loud and the world underneath where the truth lies. If you know things you can’t explain, it scares people. If you can read people’s intentions and energy and feelings, it scares people. If you know what comes next, it scares people. I spent all of my childhood learning to be a safe person, shutting out and turning down the volume of what came through; and then I learned to be a poet. To slip what lies in the underneath into a container called language, called art: I learned how to survive by defining what I am as an artist and then I couldn’t stop. I’m an addict.

When this stranger told me that story, I realized two truths: It was not his fault and it was not my fault my brother killed himself. Being a poet didn’t mean I had the words to save him. Knowing he was going to die didn’t mean I had tools to divert his path. This isn’t a story about suicide. It’s about patterns. If you watch close, life folds and if you mark the creases, you witness how the story keeps at it till you see. How quickly do you want to surface?

Megan: I thought, don’t do this. Then I did. I put my head against his heart chakra and I listened, I asked his dead to speak to me. I invited in suffering: chalice, vessel, channel.

Two weeks later, he told me he loved me. Then he abruptly left the city and moved to Florida. He met another woman and fell in love. All of this is coincidence, perhaps. When we broke contact, I texted him and said: You should know it’s not your fault. We don’t have that kind of power over others. We can’t keep them here. I wonder often when I speak or write, to whom am I talking? And it makes sense to me that we are all the same, because most of what comes out is meant for me. For you. For us.

NI:  represents patience/ purifies desire/ color is yellow/ trait of mind/ body/ speech/ action

I realized in Reiki II training how much intuition I had let waste away. I ignored my instinct and used reason to make choices, to keep safe. I invested in being helpless, powerless and let others take care of me. I was suicidal and sad from a very young age, so I thought this is I. This is normal. It never occurred to me, and I was never taught that what I was doing was absorbing what was around me, that I was born into generations of suffering and abuse and addiction. I thought I was the entire puzzle missing a piece. But I was just one piece. I began to see the story of my brother and me in a very particular way, and to understand it you would have to know how often we spoke of death. You would have to know what it feels like to have no fear of death.

The story fits on top of other stories; it is not new. It is a spiral; we are caught in its net. Once upon a time there was a sister and a brother who chose to come into the world together, one was a receiver and one was a transmitter. In order to shift great amounts of energy, a sacrifice is required. We can’t undergo great change without letting go of all we knew before, except by not being afraid to give up all of it: All that we love and all that we hate. Duality itself is what we sacrifice, and that is the trickiness of it. When my brother suicided, he set in motion a choice to go on one side of the veil and I set in motion an intention to find him. This is how channeling works: You have to be able to lock onto a reception. You have to be able to find a transmitter, blood of my blood, DNA of my DNA, memory to my memory as much myself as I am, I would know you anywhere. I would find you anywhere in all that can be imagined. And here we are?

The Egyptian myth of Isis is a story about a sister who goes into the underworld to bring her brother/ husband Osiris back. Isis is framed as a great healer, champion to women and children; she is a channel ferrying between death and life; so we, so we.

PAD: represents diligence/ purifies ignorance/ color is blue/ trait is equanimity

I thought I was losing my mind. There have been times like this in my life. The best way I can describe it is as though being unplugged like in The Matrix. It’s watching the world around you, but it registers different as a code perhaps more than as a coherent space.

I started doing this meditation where I visualized going down 108 steps, one step for each breath where I could think of nothing more than the numbered step I was on in that breath. If I lost count, I stopped and got off the mat. It took weeks to get down to 108 without losing concentration and then when I reached the bottom I realized I had no idea what to do once I got there.

Inanna goes into the underworld to meet her sister, and she is required to hang her skin on a hook. These myths, these stories, they are guidebooks for travel. You must learn to remove your skin, to find the hook, to hang your skin on the hook once you reach the bottom of the stairs. You must not be afraid that you will not be able to put your skin back on once you are ready to ascend. Who would choose this?

ME: represents renunciation/ purifies greed/ possessiveness/ color is red/ trait is bliss

Each chakra of the body has a specific megahertz at which it resonates; the chakra can be balanced simply by listening to the vibrational sound. What is the function of sound? Why speak? Why poet?  Often when the dead speak to me it is just an echo, a whisper; and other times  I speak out loud and realize I am not talking to no one, that in fact I am not talking but being talked to about what I need to see. Sound moves around us, vibrations of energy make us a never type of alone, but oh, I hunger for touch.  It is a lonely life to be populated by sound, to be haunted and distracted by unsaid.

HUM: represents wisdom/ purifies aggression/hate / color is black/ trait is compassion

I read a description of grief by William Dadarrio last  night in his book, To Grieve, in which he stated that love felt during grief is like a lighthouse shining the way to point out that there is danger but not able to navigate the ship for you. Grief is like that, a body of water you must traverse and no matter how many maps you consult, the truth is the journey has never been taken until you take it. That is the sacred key of life, for all the same stories, there is only the journey of you in the traveling. Around us, we choose to see and heed the lights shining on us great warnings, great desire for our safe passage, but whom do we champion to steer? I poet because of all the sounds I can create, there will always be a last sound. That is the only light I have to keep in line of sight: To let go in love. Which word will I choose of all the words for love when it is time to say: Farewell for now. Om Mani Padme Hum.

It is very good to recite the mantra Om mani padme hum, but while you are doing it, you should be thinking on its meaning, for the meaning of the six syllables is great and vast …. The first, OM … symbolizes the practitioner’s impure body, speech, and mind; it also symbolizes the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha…. The path is indicated by the next four syllables. MANI, meaning jewel, symbolizes the … altruistic intention to become enlightened, compassionate and loving…. The two syllables, PADME, meaning lotus, symbolize wisdom…. Purity must be achieved by an indivisible unity of method and wisdom, symbolized by the final syllable HUM, which indicates indivisibility…. Thus the six syllables, om mani padme hum, mean that in dependence on the practice of a path which is an indivisible union of method and wisdom, you can transform your impure body, speech, and mind into the pure exalted body, speech, and mind of a Buddha….

— His Holiness the Dalai Lama

dear poetry, effects of why

dear poetry,


turned culprit, awake
in that sight line's murmuration
comma of interruption invaded
caught room of lit rock
my salted evidence runs dispersed notes
darkening sky threat but our faces dry
skirting mud holes on the neutral ground
falling in line, grief has a way of arriving
fully packed on your doorstep & you
throw open your heart, lay down in great
abandon in the arms of love, sweet escape
be my eternal star gazing so i constellate
trauma, nerves carded to my lineage weaved
of careening, i ran out of new language
to stir against, sound of horns carrying us
the way a river flows or fly away, i'll fly
away, i marked memory, the sky
mixed media: white brush strokes amid blue
what is enough in life

Dear Poetry, boated to grief

Dear Poetry,

Do you ever run out of words for a breaking, the way language falls short yet we squirm inside the telling, desperate, a can-you-pull-me-free from the container of loss plunging under.

Do you know how a sibling will slip so birthdays become times of both where did I meet you and some stranger takes your place, touching me.

Do you remember the weight of a child laid on your chest, the sweet scent of you emerged from the cocoon of a place I considered land mine, a terror, the horror show of riddled fate.

Do you know how seduced I was by longing that I swallowed my name, went long silent in the draught of learning to speak double edged, forked tongue, spells loosed the swept hysteria of she screaming whose voice I can't echo.

Do you recall whole cities disappear, the past washed under watercolor, all of it traced as heart shapes in the sand near the coming tide.

Do you know that I looked for love and couldn't see it around me, my shame I held before me blocking my view as if good enough even existed, as if the notion of deserving was no more than a fiction.

When I controlled the poem, I thought I was writing my truth. I was writing a death sentence because my cells coded that lust in the making, what I grew into as legacy, mud and dirt of country houses held up by secrets names.

For you to have kept me in your sight.

Lined to the castaway. Even now I think what life carved into by love, the fissures of sound knifing beneath even bone.

-M

GHOST:: UNCHAINED MELODY

-->

GHOST

Memory: I was felt up for the first time by a boy in the back of a movie theater while the film “Ghost” played in the background, the song “Unchained Melody” echoing into this space. I read somewhere that not only could Demi Moore, who plays the lead female role of Molly in “Ghost,” not only could she cry on cue but she can choose which eye from which one perfect tear will slide. Her tears fall from the middle of her eyes it seems in one perfect glistening trail down her cheeks and no other part of her seems to be disturbed in this process. When I cry sometimes I can’t stop. I cry a lot in the car while driving and at home in the bathroom, under the shower. I have cried on the floor of my kitchen, and I have cried so hard that my eyes have swollen shut. Sometimes when the tears are sparse and they do slip slowly out as the saltwater fills my eyes, I imagine I am having a Ghost cry. It is the shallow, unconcerned cry of ennui or exhaustion and never the cry that happens if your lover is murdered in front of you. It is never the cry that accompanies deep grief. Deep grief is the wailing moan of your soul breaking, and it shatters your face. It can’t be made beautiful because it is terrible. Terror/able

Sanskrit has 96 words for love. Does the English word for love descend from the Sanskrit word lobha (trans. greed) rooting in us a desire to hoard: A desire to possess, our special beloved who can love no other. 

I've been reading the book DEBT by David Graeme and thinking about how we keep track of what we are owed. We do this in love all the time. We do this, and it is not a thing that can be calculated. What a strange species we are. 

I think a lot about Shame and how the root of "it" lies there. And by it, I mean the thing that has knocked us so far off balance.

How can you possibly know what love is when we are born into cultures/religions/ belief systms driven by shame... shame for the body and shame for the need that you have to be seen and loved. How does that debt ever get paid? Who do you owe from the beginning? 

-->

This strangled female emotion of beautiful tears became the epitome of female fragility in the 90s. The boy haircut, the perfect pair of tears and the somewhat scratchy voice embodied everything that was both tough and yet vulnerable, a nonhysterical theatric of femaleness. Molly’s belief is the epicenter of the tale, her ability to believe in love is what haunts the story. From the encounter before the murder where she asks why don’t you ever say: “I love you” to the final parting scene where she is kissing the air to say good-bye to her lover, the idea of belief in the solidity of love and how it manifests is what wars inside those pretty tears. 

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Tradition of the idea of the ghost story where the female character is not in danger from the ghost but is in danger from the real men who surround her, and the ghost offers protection or warning to that reality.

Do people believe in ghosts in a way that they do not other supernatural entities?

Are ghosts monsters?

Selah Saterstrom quotes Christian Hawkey from the book Ventrakl in her text Essays in Divinatory Poetics

"And in taking up multiple procedures of writing and translation- transwriting, transrelating- one aim was to prolong the friendship of our ghosts as long as possible" 

Tori Amos has a lyric that says: "I'm trying not to move/ It's just your ghost passing through" 

 Do we let our ghosts pass through? Do we allow them to speak or do we take up all the room with living? 

How will I know you as I have always known you? How will I manifest the liminal space? 

My friend Michelle Embree says: the words have to do something. 

Yes, the words have to do some thing. Yes, somewhere between memory and imagination and all the sounds and the silences and the trap of language, yes, we are all doing and undoing something. 

Tell me how many times have you said the word love and it did something and how many times did you say it and it did nothing. And what can we say in its place...

Day X: my surface is abandonment

"a hassled, thieving life"   -A. Notley, Benediction


the universe a vast crematorium firing
under the skin
peel back blackened to sift bone
our parceled jaws
jeering--look too I have thoughts
that conflict about staying
but to all go under, a star winking
blackness, the sole cold rock dumbly spinning
round, we tried on joy & could not find
enough ways to suspend it
tatter happiness, thimble full of grimace
keeper of constraint, how you led us below
crust, a deep soiling: a boy's afternoon treasures
my daughter's head heavy pressed against my face
in sleep, there is no thing we can truly catch
and keep, what have you taken that wasn't
yours to take, we walk away with what is under
our tongues & then forced to swallow
         there is a darkness that I am always right about
when you can't be happy with what you have
you get what you deserve



"we are in charge of the stable world but our vast world of image shared in the sea of the medium of the mind is likewise in charge of us day and night we can have no thought that doesn't reflect from this sea of telepathic communion"   -A. Notley

Lucas De Lima's GHOSTLINES

                                          Photo: Radioativemoat Tumblr Page


I read Lucas De Lima's GHOSTLINES again evacuated from New Orleans while Hurricane Isaac made landfall and while the anniversary of Katrina on August 29th made specters of us all.

I watched people in Plaquemines Parish being cut from their roofs as the water rose and trapped them. All time folds again and again. Water wants what it wants, and like any thing other than us: we can only imagine. The photo below was sent to me; this is someone's backyard made wild again. We live edged in and believe in borders that keep known from unknown, safe from danger. De Lima tells us that the poems in GHOSTLINES "mythify the alligator attack that killed my dearest friend in 2006."
What is a myth? What does it mean to make myths in this present splendor of reason and science? Isn't nature always making myths of us all?

Aug. 29, 2012

De Lima states in the opening page that in order to create this myth, metamorphosis must occur. Change that we usually see meted out in myths as punishment is here taken on like a mantle that will protect our narrator as these poems attempt to wander in treacherous lands. Or in another reading, the transformation makes possible the ability to descend from the cerebral consciousness of being human in order to embody the animal, the place we imagine that operates as primal, beyond law and reason. When someone dies suddenly or tragically, we always attempt to make sense where none can be found.  De Lima sheds that illusion and seeks a physical re-embodiment in order to be in a space that seeks not understanding as much as a place to enact grief. 

The "Ghosted Lines" of this chapbook begin immediately as we become voyeurs peeking into the correspondence and exchange between our narrator-turned-bird and the deceased friend. Coming on the heels of De Lima's artist's statement about what this book will attempt, we are given a note that begins: 

"Lucas, Is there any way you could give me a few pearls of advice on my artist statement? I just wrote it now and I'm going to bed without feeling very good about it. I know it's not done, but please, if you have a minute, make comments." 

This is how we enter the poem: in communion, in failure, in potential, in knowing it's not done, in need for an "other" to comment. 

In "Mutation [2]" after describing a movie where a man mutates into an alligator, De Lima quickly conflates the fantastic with the real: "The director has to kill off his ugly protagonist & the trapper has to exterminate the gator that got Ana Maria because every story has to end with a period." 

De Lima then transforms before us exploding out of the narrative and away from the control of telling a story and into the vortex of:

UNLIKE A POEM

UNLIKE A POEM I WRITE WITH ANA MARIA

UNLIKE A POEM I WRITE WITH ANA MARIA'S ALLIGATOR

UNLIKE A POEM I WRITE WITH HER BLOOD & THE ALLIGATOR'S

UNLIKE A POEM WE WRITE LIKE A WET LAND

And then we are birded. Ready to land in dangerous waters, to confront and get close to the beast. We are ready to be ghosted by emails and heartbreaking confessions that were never meant for us, like :

"OH BOY, I LOVE YOU. WILL YOU SEND ME A POEM?"

The communion of beasts is primal, is sexual. De Lima states: 

IF SEX MUST BE LOUD

THEN I'LL OPEN MY MOUTH 

I WILL MAKE AN O THAT SUCKS YOU BACK TO LIFE

The sexual desire to stimulate, to reanimate coupled with the tender intimacy of affection and love for the lost body, the body that in the poem has been transformed into recollected notes and lines. In a way, even though our narrator survives, the transformation into a bird makes a ghost of the speaker as well. It is as if both humans have fled, and deep in the myth, we try to read the ciphers left to us among reptiles and their ancestors: "AS THE BIRD EATS ME/ AS I BIRTH MY WAY OUT"

In the end De Lima's mythos has encapsulated us as readers as well; we are told:

MANY READERS ARE GHOSTS

OBSESSED WITH OUR BODIES

De Lima's lines resonated deeply with me. I felt armed with more questions than ever and maybe a bit consoled by the inevitable. Elegy is a familiar space for the poem, but De Lima manages to make it uncomfortable and to make us question what we want from the poem and what we expect from 

coming face to face with the dark haunts we keep ensconced within. I want to dwell in what I unearthed: How often do we enact a thing before it becomes us? Before we feel it? 

When does grief ever really end once the river breaks free?

You can no more put the flood back then you can fly away. 

New Orleans, 2005

You can purchase a copy of this hand made chapbook with its painted cover here: 

Radioactivemoat