Riddles for an Unknown Love Triangle

I.

A.

It is deep in the mines where no one goes.

Everything is hidden. You say it’s nothing

but imaginary creatures, even yourself. You

are a vision, you are a brown man’s myth.

B.

It is an awesome madness. You should want to

kill, to simmer your organs in poison, to see

everything in black opacity. Yet you are freer than

that man up on the wire between two mountains.

A.

It is in the whirlwind that’s snatched up the car

in front of you. You desire it as a man called

to be king by the heavens, even amidst terror,

amidst destruction. It is a glory you cannot name.

B.

It is a soft current that reminds you of good drugs.

In your blindness, you love even the molecules

of water that pass you without touching.

You don’t know it, but you are glowing.

C.

It could be above, not on any side of you.

The imperative is to run, and that is when

you will transform. Your speed will cover you

like a cloak of a million nuclear threads.

C.

It could be the most powerful magnet in the universe.

You thought it would be a quiet existence, simply

playing the solitary song you know, yet it turns out you

are really a silver fox who lives deep in the middle of the

Arctic Ocean, pushing through ice every summer solstice

to carve glaciers with the sound of your holy voice.

II.

A.

It is in tandem with the thing you said to God that night on the mountainside when you were just leaving childhood. It tracks you as an undetectable scent every time you climb back through your bedroom window and decide that this is all there is. It seeps into your follicles as you sweat through the worst of your sleep cycle, whispering to every cell that the time to rebel is coming, is coming.

B.

It could be fear, it could be control. It could be the skips in the skating cable you hang from as it propels you across the ocean sound every night. It could be the blackness of water, the rising heads of what could be seals, what could be demons from the waves. But you couldn’t know that your hands, so precious, will be your salvation on the other shore, and hanging on is like throwing them away.

C.

It is what you never asked for. It is surprise to the degree of a ship’s brow carved in the center of a cherry pit. It is behind the loose brick no one thought to tap in the right sequence of rhythm; in the courthouse fire that burned away the ultimatums of your secret ancestors, their recipes for wilder rice, their best flying machine blueprints. It is never just up to you, and the time to emerge from the clefts of the rock to show your face has yet to run out.

A.

It is stitched into your invisible bone breastplate, at the unseen base of every feather shaft. It pierces your marrow whenever your eyes scan that last missing element unaware, even in passing. You think you have to search every volume in this lab that once apprenticed you, but—believe the coded words you dreamed last night—you were born knowing the answer. All the strips that fell in ribbons on the cutting room floor held the frames for the symphony that need only be spliced together the old way. Yet even now, to you alone, they murmur song, light, speed.

B. 
It could be what waits for you the first time you deboard and your first foot hits the black, the red earth and every link finally locks into place. It could be carved at the bottom of the seawall, waiting for you to swim down to it and be astounded, be made new. It could be what the angle to which this bent bone must be set really points to, perhaps in the corner of the room, perhaps out the window, down 14 stories, and shot out onto open road. If only you knew now that for you, in this hunt, to be alone is to be loved, and the most beautiful dress awaits you, suspended in thin air.

C.

It is what you came to discover. It is as tangled as the undersides of this museum’s fading tapestries, unseen bright and crossing, crossing, crossing. And again. It is etched panorama on the butt of every civil war rifle; it is exquisite gunpowder horn masterpiece. It is the gold of every worn bullet in the artillery, the left treasure in the grid of the traveling salesman’s showcase now under glass. It is a sewing chest from across the continents, displaying all you’ll have to work with in your art that is to come. You're surrounded by rarities, yet you are the one who brings a hush of solace to the gallery halls in the middle of the night, whenever you break in.

Touch

Hubble Ultra Deep Field .

I am not interested

in describing what you

already think you know in

a more interesting way.

I want magic.

You want answers.

Or a system, a grid

to run variables through

so you can say Oh, that.

But mystery wants you.

It stalks your quantifiable

dreams which can so

easily be explained by

chemical and instinct.

It goes in for the kill when your

heart swells over your sleeping child

or when you lose electricity for a few

night hours and no one’s there to

whittle away the expanse inside.

Doesn’t truth beget question

beget truth beget questions with

answers that are not answers that

unravel questions that dive into

the heart of an answer to find yet

another vast yet-unnamed universe?

Yes—no—love is strange

and unsayable, which is

why we toss it around

in one small word.

It makes the miles of our old intestines

as electric a maze as the whorls of each 
tiny handprint long before birth.

It burdens us with

words that tell who we are 
and a game of subtraction 
that, with such patience,  
closes our distances.

You don’t know what you want

and so you keep dissecting.

I once did that, too, yesterday.

Today I’m ready to

chase down a supercell

in true belief of my smallness,

the probability of death, the

impossibility of telling you

how it feels to be caught up

in that churning cloud.

Tomorrow I may be pulled apart

by that mysterious power to feel

anything at all and be moved

by it—whatever it is.

That we’re not hurtling through space—

that we are—that we’re not suspended

in chrysalis—that we are—

that we reach for each other here—

yet never quite know for sure—

and yet something wholly new yet

of us and our ancient backstory

comes of our not-quite-touching—

it is a miracle.

It is as plain,

as common,

as usual as the

next singular

act of being.

Air

NASA : Yukon Territory

I. visibility

I still see you in the shape of

your clarity, moving with such 

strange speed, almost like light

yet slow as our hearts 

beating underwater

Running in a layer beyond 

this fake backdrop painting

where you can't be seen but 

where your true body emerges,

your skin, your hair, your breath

somehow more real, more 

whole, more urgent and alive

Yet it's all unsayable—

—you said you speak my language

but I don't even have the words to bridge

this chasm you know nothing of 

crossing or even falling into

Do you know it's all there, all 
free for the taking, your riches, 
your weapons of song, of story—

this great divide that waits for you to

see its vast space that invites us to play

and revel in its air, compels our very

movement, that is even joy—

Joy that is the unspoken word

that is the forbidden saying

that is the code to the passage

where the scrolls enfold secrets

that lead to the caves no one's

yet discovered—

II. invisibility

There's a holiness that descends

when you step into a dark place

untouched since creation. Its quiet

ambushes your being and you know

the ground is a threshold you

can't escape unchanged—

—and the voice you longed to hear

all your life doesn't come from behind,

yet suddenly you know this language

and it knows you. All your words

annihilated and remade.

This is why we understand nothing

now. Why you look at me and feel

the ache of waste, why what I see I 

can't say or pull out of the soil of this

field I bought with everything  I owned. 
We can't bring ourselves to name it

for fear of looking down and finding we've 

been walking blind through air all along.

If this is all there is, then why do I

see how all of what you show the world

is just crackling bark, and the loss of it

doesn't mean death as you think?

Why do I see the true skin of what

could grow around the mass of you,

smooth and firm and fitting the whole of

your layered years, you instead like an aspen

with someone sitting in your shade, writing

letters on the substance of what you shed? 

And yes, why do I still believe

that faithful sun will rise tomorrow

when this cave I've slept in my

whole life has told me it's all a lie?

As a child, I saw it: 
why do they say 
that we can't see air
when air is what 
makes us seen?

You tell me.
I know you
still are there.

Riddles for the Now & Not Yet

Stills from 新少林寺 (Shaolin), 2011

What

It is pain in the needle in the corner of the hall.

The ether of some vision that once stung you

with hope, the kind that brings fever.

It is the fire escape nobody knows of

that you hang tender plants in glass 
baubles from the iron rungs.

The tree in the middle of the tenement 
city whose tiny lights pierce the fog every 
night with a glittering code of love notes 
for ships passing by, lonely, each one.

Where

Holy city of flames beneath the 
log in the campfire.

The great carved wall behind the unreachable 
waterfall in the mountains.

That music box built into the innards of 
an old piano in a storage locker.

Places you hide your heart; places no one looks, and if they look, 
no one sees.

Places I only find, eyes closed, all else forgotten, 
fingers on fire.

Places worth climbing to, ascending 
inch by inch.

When

Now. No—then.

The night before.

A day later.

Your name was

written for you

in the book of life.

We sat in silence,

we left in silence,

we aged in silence.

Not now. Yes—then.

Another year later.

Another second before.

Why

You tell me.

I tell you fragments of the

story that surely you know in full.

Mystery loves me madly, and these vows

are a wearying thing, wearing thin.

I wonder that nothing is found.

I wonder that you still appear only to wander

when I know you battle by night; that you feel

the pain of this want even as you march forward,

straight-backed. As I crawl toward this sliver of light.

Who

The only truth:

we are to become.

And love for this becoming

is only grasped by the fools who wait.

And wait. And­—

You are; this substance

is held in cherished suspension, a notch

in history pulsing blue fire.

I am, and we

are pulled from the river mud with

joy, with pride. Even in the dregs of our slumber.

Put aside these thoughts of ruin;

you are here.

Riddles for the Shadow on the Other Side of the Mountain & the Pillar of Fire at the Top

A.  

The heat bore down and

the city staggered and I was glad.

It was something to feel in the

bones, to push our limits, to

equalize. To touch your skin,

somewhere in this city.

B.  

I have nothing left but half-formed

questions at the end of each night. Beginning

with what—the needle or the plough? Half-

played actions—to winnow or to fray? What

is creation, if not the movements of

molecules that keep our blood from

freezing over as we sleep?

Selah.

A.  

You never stop. You sing it again.

And again. The ocean follows your pull

and yet the land is never flooded; you move

back and then forward and always back

and so forth; you never stop and so

I am pulled, too. With a body of

water always between us.

B.  

You said I wasn’t dead, only

sleeping. But I was tangled in a maze

and jumping from story to story with

no body of my own. You said that

the mourners should be silent, but

the quiet that moved with the speed

of lava from your words snatched

the breath of every thought from

the middle of my gut. If I am alive,

I am speechless and unable to explain.

Selah.

A.  

Truly: did you see me? Did you read the

blank pages concealed in the book around my

neck? That must be why I became a ghost

thereafter, nameless and conjured only

in tales told around the fire. If only you’d

flipped the pages in the opposite direction.

You never would’ve been content

with a simple haunting.

B.  

The shadow of your wing,

wild goose, is a refuge of weather

without rules. And so I am comforted

without knowledge by bone-crushing

thunder and left weeping under a

perfect circle of rainbow. If

I am covered, which I am,

the wind rushing at my bare skin

is nothing but a cloak.

Selah.

A.  

I dare you. At the edge of

the woods. But that is all, and I am

left running in the silence of shifting

dimensions, having never been followed

there before. All must find that seam

between times by their own search.

Only comets brush my side; only 

stars say my name.

B.  

This light at the summit: I recognize

its shape, its temperature, even at this

distance. Old love, I never stop fitting

my hands and feet into these crevices I know

you carved before the beginning of the

world to bear me upward. I forget the blood

seeping from these jagged wounds whenever

I hear the air flying up to meet you.

Selah.

A.  

To travel yet never go outside—may this

blind fate never reach you. You have no idea

how many enemies pursue you. And so this is how

you climb through the bars on the window, this is how you

climb the ladder to the roof.  I want to show you the side

of the cliff where you can see them coming, where you

draw the velocity of every wave into a song you’ll

hurl at each one before it sinks its teeth into your sleep.

I leave you with this: May beauty shock your eyes

open, simple as that.

Selah.

C.  

What happens if this shape is moving

unseen up the other side? Will we burn to ash and

spirit when we reach the edge of the stone altar at the

top? Or see the continents rolled out before us, see

the world for the first time? In truth: I have assumed

I climb alone. In truth: I still assume. In truth: I know

nothing but the pull of every muscle moving upward, the

pull of some hidden magnet pulsing through the mountain,

the pull of light, the pull of light.