A Magazine of Many Arts

My booth-thin box of glass holds Daddy dear,
Brown eyes lens-big, bald spot in jet-black hair,
Bemused and curious, with startled stare
And starting smile to find himself brought here,
As sudden as a dream, whisked back from time,
The youthful forty-nine I knew at three,
Saved from a death that he can’t even see,
Yet glad as ever for this family time.

My elevator-box is rich with hours,
Air fresh with life and hope, its strength renewed
By joy from those receiving its rare gift:
Reunion with our loved ones. Though the power’s
Limited, our glassed guests only viewed,
Our mutual spirits rise on my time lift.

illustration is portrait of the poet’s father

The shadow-man-outside-the-airlock,
in our sleep,   Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  walks outside our cave.
He shuffles,                   scrapes dead sticks,
pretends to be the wind, pretends
to be other                    than our dim selves –
glitch in our evolved mindware.

The man-creature-outside-the-airlock,
spider-eyed,                    dressed in bones,
alien                                in the flesh,
glowers, growls, and shakes a graven stick.
We have come  Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  to meet him.
Yet our shadow infests us.

Bogeymen still bewilder
us starmen.                    It is hard,
amidst our familiar ghosts,
to assay the alien,
to hear the voice            above the wind.
Eyes open, open the door.

illustration from Stories of Beowulf by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, 1908

Her wails draw rings of fire
around my bed; in combat

a psychic makes me wash my hair
with sea, and the roots come undone

almost as if by gratis. He says her wails will
travel the trenches occupying caves underwater –

the place where seafolks dwell:
(we whisper their names
lest they come to being).

It is how it is, he enunciates the air
with a low voice. And I travel into past
tense. It must be returned to

the throat that delivers these wails; as if by
skill of the dual-tailed living deep in waters

of the kind we bathe with to release
knots tied in our strands. The whole

point about blind belief is in questioning
nothing; is in letting the power of

an aging scry heal you; is to forget you
ever caused her empty promises. Now,

the sea begins to shudder on my wet scalp,
murmuring echoes like carbonite chemicals.

The psychic tells me this is initiation; the way
for dowsing to find home; her wails tell me

clearer of inhabitation – how her body is
a field of clovers, entities of the sea take her

as theirs every night. Drops of the sea
trickle down my back the length of my hair;

whispering back my understanding of how
I was a blank slate, of how she fell onto it

like braille, while he presses a dry cloth
to my forehead, invoking the jinn to cease.

By GO69 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65084170