The Death Wall
(Auschwitz)


Beside Block Eleven crumbles imperceptibly.  We bring fire and flowers
to convince it to hold together. The wall,
like a proscenium, opens onto a narrow yard of weed and gravel, red brick
barracks throttle its sides.

The scene went like this: men and women would disrobe in separate sunlit cells.  Their flesh-combed skeletons rattling in rows, each bleaching into the next.  Heads held down, away from the trigger
now pulled.

This wall bore the stacking weight of limbs
without complaint -- as a wall should do. Its maze of tears spiraled invisibly, blisteringamidst the blood-letting crowns. 
Not a wall, but regurgitated stone,porous as if eaten by the sea.

Today we trace its blackened face with breath
in our hands.  
Each new finger tip skimming its scars.
The sad sands fall
beneath our touch, daring it to remain standing
through life after already doing so for death.

America Stands
   --September 11, 2001


The day you wake up to smoke and rubble,
Falling bodies and buildings,
The day you wake up to screams and silence,
goodbyes you didn’t concede and will never grant: mommies and daddies, daughters and lovers, countrymen, sisters, and workers
stolen in front of your eyes

In front of your eyes!

The day you wake up to America watching itself collapse like so
many houses of cards,
a poisoned island
gasping for the cool seawater to wash the pollution from its throat,
The day you wake up to the rest of your life
is one more day you rise
and stand as tall as a tower, a survivor
shuffling from the ash-laden powerlessness of tears.

One Year Later

   --September 2002


One month later
fear falls between our steps,
threatening to trip each movement forward.  We learn to walk on our heels, grounded, afraid of heights.
We fly flags in lieu of ourselves. An easterly wind carries our tears
to Ground Zero.

Three months later
winter washes over the rubble, incredulity draining down sewers.  
We emerge from the nest
like so many fledglings
flailing back to negotiations and cocktails.

Seven months later
the flags that remain are weather-weary
and faded like memory.  
The rage is unconscious,
stirring within the reddened cave
of our bowels where we keep such things.

Ten months later
we manage to forget,
like a child given a treat after a fall. The scrapes scar under the sun’s glare.
 
One year later
our bodies remember
before our minds.  
We are walking on our heels again, a weight settling in our stomachs
our gaze meets the sky.  
September redefines itself
with the falling of
each dead leaf.

Hands
 

I see them daily managing their way
around my body, my house, the pages
I turn.  Hands of my father, sinewy
and scarred, they splinter the cold.
Hands of my mother, feline and fearless, they wade the moon’s
pools.  With age I have noticed cracks
overcrowding the skin. 

Perhaps there was a time when my fingers
awoke spring petals from hibernation,crafted Nahuatlan sundials, slayed Minotaur charging from the sea.  
There is a map in the seat of my palm - a plan of a city I’ve never been,
instructions to the lost poetry of Sappho, or a codified explanation
for the Milky Way -  but a wheat brown mole covers the key.

Published in Liberty Hill   Poetry Review