The Chronicle

At the end of my childhood, which appears
now to me in dreams as a camp, God
called each and every one of us to the hall
and handed us our griefs. “You become adult
now,” God said, a knife edge in His voice. For a
certificate, my grief was as thick as God’s Book
of Suffering. I held its hardcover catastrophe;
remembered the hard exterior of that school-
day in June when my father struck a lightning
across the clouds of my face. I bled on the
rag of memory. There was no saving nostalgia
from that impossible red. In the light of a gauze;
under a lens of steel and quartz, I examined
my past and future pain. O how difficult
it was to hold my gaze. All around me,
a papercut apocalypse. Amalgam of tears
and blood. People running into the light
of whatever innocence remained. I held still
the pen of my body; gushed no ode
to pandemonium. If time is a river rushing,
I thought, then I will mirror the heart
of my ancestors who had no word for drowning
but walked instead to the bottom of the sea.

The Trick Is

                        after Ellen Bass

to hide your fear of death
where even death fears to look,
which is deep inside your living,
between the risks and dumb shine,
not unlike a highway full to stupor
of damning lights and sounds.
And when death rides her pale horse
into the canyon, its hoofbeat matching
the thump of your heart; when the terror
of the age-old stones trembling
shoots up your spine,
more arrow-like than arrows,
electric, a whole fever of feelings,
and you think, Should I not now
find some stable ground?
To stand atop the leering edge,
and hold that fear like a seed, all black
stone, cold, bearing no suspicion
of the warmth of life, and say yes,
I will carry you with me.