IN KABUL
Candlelight skids up the child who
sleepwalks with eyes wide.
Airwaves lower than sound or
shudder rattle cups
and doors. In her dreams, trees
cling to their blood apricots
swollen with the darkness of
curfew nights.
Touch one and it explodes. Her
father’s vigil is crumpled
by insomnia: was that wind-shift
or voices shrilling
above the crack of footfalls
beyond view? It is the hour of curtains
jerked from grip. Out there,
gloved hands are setting down
landmines the shape of toys. By morning,
miles of window glass
lie glittering, chips of sun. A
layer of dust on every cup of water.
After the one p.m. car bomb, the
front door falls toward her father
as he pulls it open. It is another
month. The child’s coat slumped
against a tree. He is searching
for her. He wants to tell her
about the bent limbs, the elbows
of trunk, the way it leans
against grantic rocks, gestures
fortified by nutrients and hope.
Parted clouds brighten a shrike
balanced on a stalk. Swaying
back and forth, its body keeps a
tempo of hunger against
the valley’s great backdrop strewn
with silences.
The slow ache of sky sinking
through his search.
Now a chewed-up fruit with her
tooth marks. Arrows of distress
scatter like night-birds from the
open mouth of falling.
Now wind whistling, a half-shout
running through it.
AMAZING GRACE
The leader sings it, and all rise.
Singing of the hush. Singing of tumult,
of daylight sucked from
stained-glass windows. The song like a storm
roaring between past and present,
entering each singer as an anthem
of faith, emerging as dirge. Each
singer an island, an orphaned
silence, filled. The nine named
over and over so all remain with us. The
whispers. The moment the walls
turned into paper and shook with
light. The books lying open, the
dark drops. Dust bits hanging in a
slant of sun. Late light flooding
the floor with color. The light making
contact splitting one irrevocable
moment from the next. Now the
song as memory, as the means of
counting the vanished one by one
without numbers. Arriving at nine
and unable to go beyond. What is
lost, replenished by grace. Each
mouth full of words incinerated, yet
carrying on. For none of the
extinguished will go voiceless. Mouths
full of vespers will sing of them.
A thousand songs. Faces and candles
from here to the horizon, and
onward. The hymn multiplying into
a living continent of song. All
will continue to sing it. All will rise.
President Obama sang in memory
of the nine people who lost their lives in the 2015 Charleston massacre.
PILGRIMAGE TO COW’s MOUTH MOUNTAIN
In the time of ice, a time before
glaciers began retreating
and Mount Everest began losing
whole feet
of height to the world’s rising
heat, four men walked
carrying a curtained palanquin.
Hidden inside,
my grandmother sat with her clutch
of sketching pencils,
a sheaf of paper. First light
brushed a cold burn
against blue snows miles above
touch. They climbed
toward headwaters, boulders the
size of cabins.
Closed in where the Ganges River
roared
down rapids. Skin of fire and body
of darkness
carving canyons into stone flour,
silty riches,
and banks full of chestnut trees
and edelweiss.
My grandmother steps into the
spray. Enters
the blue hallways, the generations
of song.
The skirts of her sari balloon out,
then cling.
Toes sink into sand. The blue-gold
everywhere.
Her teeth are chattering. Thirst
and cold become one.
Eyes, head, and hands in prayer. Give
me the strength to live
without walls. Mica bits
glitter as they fly downstream.
THE SIERRA: A HISTORY
Not long after lightning has
rushed down the electric staircase
of its own making, not long after
fires five stories tall have
swept up-canyon, a new season the
size of pearls begins.
Silences spreading like hands to
touch the heads of seedling
and fiddlehead nudging out by the
hundreds through ceilings
of soil and ashy debris. Hours as
loose as scree firming up in
tender grips.
Here a stand of charred oaks
unwraps its storage of gangly
leaves, there a knot of cones
thrown open by heat releases
seeds ripe for sun. Currents of
brightness are charged from
within. Sunlight plucks at the
strings of top branches. Up
at the crown, blackened firs begin
again their story of vigor,
edged with new needles. The
irresistible music, tinsel-and-
chime notes. Wind nosing close to
the buds to receive all the
answers.
The burned and crackling world not
in shambles. Not gone
to ash and ash alone. Sapsucker,
pileated, black-backed
woodpeckers, all join the jig of
genetic diversity. All build
from scratch. What do they crave?
Riches. Riches hidden in
the wide-open arches rising from
gray.
Many of the trees that
initially look dead are not. – Chad Hanson
NOW YOU CAN SET DOWN YOUR FEARS
A sweep of brightness raises the
mountaintops from sleep.
As if on cue, a rush of breath
answers the stuff of ages,
the essentials, lands and gurgling
waters awakened
by silence rising once the flames
have fallen.
Now you can set down your fears.
You can see
the tribes arriving. Sprig by
sprig, the forests
unwrapping layers of light. The
old and the new, shoulder
to shoulder. Ambers, reds, and
greens, following
internal instructions. Lily,
lupine, conifer, marking time
in concentric circles, working
through their intricacies.
Now the wild ones, with inner eyes
drawing
from the Pleistocene, are arriving
with the disposition
of their ancients. And the order.
Mice, owls, foxes yipping.
Lines of pilgrims with the
training, the shape and scents
of paths mapped out. And now the
mule deer, the lions.
All along, they knew to arrive. To
shift and settle into place,
in a vast machinery of
rebirth—tasting the good light,
anticipating the soot on their
feet, the unknowns. Listening
for scratchy sounds. A trilling
laces the bite of air. Winks of light
catch a tiny pool of dew held in a
swordfern’s hollow.
All the looseness of soil, potash,
charcoal, crumbly
between the press of finger and
thumb, is firming up
in grip-shaped roots steadily
descending into darkness.
The air still, the breath of
seedlings edging out
of slumber. Close to the treetops,
inches of relearning
find their way out of the shadows.
New whorls echo
the shape of their burned
predecessors. Faith alights
on the sooty drapes covering
trees. The birds cling, flash.
Announce the sap, the squirming meats, the great
bounty.
To read Why Sonoma County Poet Laureate Wants to Reach Everyone, via The Press Democrat, see here.
To purchase copies of All the Fires of Wind and Light by Maya Khosla, see here.
