Excavation in Dreamtime

I. Chamber of Wounds

This time, the bird has black wings.
You’ve been following it for centuries,
a woman crawling
on numb hands and knees.
The sun rises every day,
and every night when it sets,
you beg it to stay.
You are always hungry,
but never stop to eat or drink.
You leave a trail of blood behind you,
but never stop to bandage your wounds.
Once you’re search had meaning,
now it’s as worthless as the moon,
a cold, dead body that no longer gives off heat.
You curse its glow, you know it’s
mocking you. Choking on dust,
shrapnel shoots from your eyes;
teardrops bomb craters in the desert.
You crawl past bodies leaking cold blood
on to the impassive ground.
Even the ground has
turned its back on you.
You never once gave it
a word of thanks.

Blood, which by day
pools red as sun’s rays,
trickles silver and self-contained
like mercury across the barren landscape.
Over time, the craters fill.
Poisoned, choking, marching
to the beat of your rattling bones,
you’ve made it to the edge of enemy territory
without drowning.
All you have to do now is drag
yourself across the border to be safe,
but when you reach the rim of the last crater
you look back--the bird with black wings
hovers above the surface of the blood lake
and lands on a dead tree shaped like a gibbet.
You see hanged men rotting at the crossroads.
You watch the black-winged bird pluck its eyes out,
two dull stones.

How can the heart go on beating?
How can we expect her to turn back
when she’s so close to relief?
The bird dives in.
Ripples scream across the surface of the lake.
She has no flesh left on her palms,
her knees are scraped bare like a
wind-pummeled mountain peak.
Now that her eyes, witness to the
rapes of a thousand mothers and the
deaths of a thousand sons
have been stolen, she wants to see.
Deep beneath the surface
the bird’s wings flap like fins.
She doesn’t hear taunt or plea
in its cawing, she hears a memory,
a severed limb calling out to its body.
She finally understands
why the heart has to break.

In the heart of every wound
a dream of a seed germinates.
This time, she feels everything,
but now pain is a bursting pod
rising up through the soil
that will open itself again to the sun,
a crimson poppy
which has already forgotten
its birth pangs.

II. Chamber of Contracts

You close your eyes.
The river is always the same,
the words always waiting.
Do you know what is written
on the walls of the tomb
where your broken heart waits?
Finally, you realize the crows
circling the dead tree
waiting in the field you pace
when you need to put your mind at ease
have been calling your name.
Lightning, a flaming arrow shot straight
from the center of a nightmare
pins you to the ground like a
butterfly in a specimen case.
For one second you see
you’ve always been asleep.
Who wrote the book of laws
by which you live out your allotted days,
the scholar writes in a dusty volume
that nobody thinks to read.
The question has been waiting
in the crook of the dead tree.
Your eyes open to the lies
that have led you to this place,
grasping for the banks
as the river sweeps you away.
You find yourself facedown in sand,
skin unmarked as snow at daybreak.
When you look at your reflection,
you don’t recognize your face.
The water is both clear and opaque,
shifting as you struggle with the
burden of centuries.
Only gravity gives weight,
the butterflies say.
The butterflies believe you can fly,
but for you, crawling’s the only way.
You grip the sand grains until your skin gleams,
polished by pain.
As the flock beats its wings
on the walls of the tomb, you don’t panic,
and you don’t wonder if there
will be enough air to breathe.
They are carving words on the walls
that will set you free.
Your lungs fan a flame so you can read:
Love Pain.
Only too well, you think.
Then you see yourself crawling
across the battlefields, wanting only
a jug of clean water to drink.
A wounded man reaches out to you.
Your enemy.
Blood pools around you,
its color leached, this bleak vision
etched in black and white.
You raise your knife to kill him--
but something makes you hesitate.
Blood from your wounds
staining the ground red again,
the earth quakes in grief.
You know if you don’t drop your knife
there will always be an enemy
laying in wait.

III. Chamber of Grace

This time I didn’t need to follow anybody.
I lay down in the river heedless of the cold,
not caring that rocks dug into my tender places.
I knew their flint could strike a fire in my bones
that would burn away the web binding me
to a body defined by drought, beyond tears,
a fire to cleanse the charred remains of a woman
who has lain in the dirt and been raped,
who has watched soldiers slash her son’s throat
then thunder away.
Tonight the wind carries homeless memories through
open French doors and offers them a place to sleep.
Lay down, I tell them. The sheets are clean.
Once, I thought the insects surrounding my house
were an army, a squadron about to invade.
Now they’re a chord plucked out on a harp
by a hand I can’t see. Or is it mine,
tracing an outline of sound on the edge of a cliff,
about to fall off into a swell that can’t be contained
within these black marks traveling across this page?
I am both underground and flying,
my wings are fins, and the secrets I’ve sought
opens to me like the lips of the cowry I found once
on an island I traveled to in search of words,
not realizing they were already inside me.
Now, not even an iridescent butterfly can
seduce me away from the sight of my three-year old self
spinning through a field of daisies.
When saltwater scours the goldenrod,
you’ll know it’s not the sweetness of honey you need,
but the bitter taste that can only be accepted through grace.
The outline of sound I traced on the edge is filled with
particles too small to be seen by the human eye.
They can only be felt.
Once felt, the body becomes free to accept
the soul’s need to stand at the edge and leap,
knowing space is not empty, but a web of light
waiting to catch us when we dare to fall.
The ghosts who haunted this poem at the beginning
have crossed over into the arms of patient angels
lowing us all to sleep.
The sheets are clean, a voice whispers.
It’s time to dream.