Poems from "Wishing Cap and the Middle Distance"

Wishing Cap and the Middle Distance is a book-length manuscript that combines poetry and prose and unfolds stories within stories. Prose sections tell a fictional, allegorical story of two characters dreaming of connection, and then the book’s poems explore the “middle distance” that must be crossed in order to move from isolation to love.

Here are a few poems from the book’s middle distance:


As Eurydice

I’ve been among the roots
and there’s a warmth in the world
people have forgotten.

Inside the kettling bed and rotting
of everything that lives
it’s hot as the body.

Oh, I know how you looked for me,
on sidewalks, in the silhouettes of leaves,

how you lived on like a man
with your work and work
in the bonecold you call dread.

But we both had known you once
as me, and, God,
were you heroic in your need,
coming back like that

Then we set off
toward who you’d been

and it snapped
in you—what
had I known without you—

that fast flash of cheek—

and what did you see?

Gleam
of my shoulder or knee?

Anyway. They were live things
coursing with light.

It happened so fast:
me, made a part
in a gesture you called your own.


*

So again we are made into opposites

as your night becomes my morning.

Once when we lived together as one
and many—before you named yourself
history—Achilles, Orpheus, Nicodemus,
John the Baptist, Jesus, Buddha, Robin Hood,
Martin Luther, Prince and Peter Pan—
we had names we were born knowing.

They surfaced in me, in the slow river of sleep,
they turned in me and now
I have to spend lifetimes
meeting them back.

So in one epoch we lack faith.
In another, doubt.

In both there comes a moment
when to turn back is to lose everything—

the world of greens we live in
and the world of shades we write about.

There our voices hollow like wind through bones,

There our voices whittle the bones
and there is this sense

of having traveled far
through stone and standing water

to arrive at something so natural
and known all along:

the bowl of the belly,
the vessel and port,

stone and roots riddling us
porous until we are again

tendon-pull and fetal-pull
in a species-pull tided as the seas.

Where—do you see?—
any suspicion is a severing.


*

The dogs at the gate will stop barking

The snow on the ground will shine
coarse as sand and the day’s conversation.

There will be redbuds and steeples again,
sun sparking on cinders.

And at the end of the day
you will sleep, dreaming salt

on your tongue and the body
you loved and wore around you once,

paddling eyeless, rooted, in water,
swimming through bloodbeat to a song.

Did you feel the tiny ancient lives
nipping at your ankles?

Did you fish them out
and call them sounds?

I was one of them—minnow, crayfish,
urchin or hinged seed—

before you called my name and it
summoned me.


*

All night I am ferried in a boat

by my pregnant friend.

The water is deep, the night
velvet and deep.

She steers expertly, past diminutive white cities,
through archipelagos of blue and green.

Then she delivers me
to the other side, where I have a child

who wants to wear a necklace
strung of beads of blood.

Is this the bardo, the ocean,
the expanse between death

and the unbegun? the child asks.
I am trying to tie the strands

but I am unfamiliar with my hands.
I try, again, and fail, a knot,

and fail a knot again
when you call, waking me

to the ring and the wand
of your voice.

It wants to steer me, shield me
through the wilderness of sleep, of me.

Undifferentiated liquid, it breathes
both within me and outside me, heavily

as an ocean. I listen
amid the clock’s tick,

counterfeit drum of what the blood does.



A child asks,

What is the middle distance?

The space before your name, I say.

What is the middle distance?

The space that between us remains.

The wish of me?

The you of you.

Who is the you of me?

The little god we call the future.

At this the child straightens,
and stays awhile in silence.

What else is the middle distance? the child asks,
coming closer.

It’s any desert you’ll have to cross when you arrive here
in your life. It is your long highway over land

sculpted by a longing to be what it was
when it was water.

It is the body, which will stun you with its beauty,
with the way it changes shape and shines.

And it is the metaphor of the body,
which will surprise you with becoming—

avocado in the mouth,
a pale blossom on a branch,

the stinging grass,
and oiled knee, another’s light-swimming eye.

It is the metaphor of self,
which will inure you with its innumerable faces,

and the self itself,
which will humble you with assumptions.

What else? the child asks.

It is your past, your early arrivals in cities—
thirsty and sleep-deprived but bitingly alive

in which you will know yourself
in your aloneness. And it is this aloneness,

which you will find like a blood-rooted tooth
in the bread of every one of your loves,

Even this love? The child asked, frightened.

Yes. Even this love,
I had to answer.

*

Turtle

Years later, after cities and acquisitions, we took a tour
to see eggs buried in sand. In the center of night
we were rowed across a channel, a flat, reflecting
tendril of the sea. We stared into the drifts of stars
and folds of dark water and no one spoke.

Our guide was weary of being a guide.
He was tired of peeling himself away from his wife
and their yeasty bed of sleep after a long day of work and low pay
to row people through miles of night
to what they may or may not be able to see.
He’d met so many who did not see.
And yet it was his job. He had children to feed.

He wearily, evenly rowed us across,
the hopped out into the shallows,
holding the boat by a rope
and we took off our shoes
and stepped into water ankle-deep and skin-warm
and the ocean we understood then was a body
beating with stars.

Stars laced the waves and glinted like chips of glass in the sand.
They dripped in glittering strands over our ankles
and across the pleated tops of our feet,
and we walked through them,
over that soft borderland collapsing,
while the water swallowed the marks we’d made.

We walked until we forgot why we were walking.

Then one of us asked, What are these lights in the water?
And, like that, her question made them real.

Plankton, our guide answered, tiny plants
spawned to communicate with the moon.

And we were that luminous and we were that numerous,
but we were caught in the gauze of separateness.

Then our guide stopped.
And before us a great viridian creature emerged from the water.

For months she’d ridden the currents with the others.
She’d set off, quick as a skiff, then threaded the tides ever deeper, further,
arriving, finally, to give birth on the same star-strewn sand,
at the same star-strewn moment, that she was born.

She lumbered up the dune.
She chose her spot, blind, in a daze,
she had not eaten for days, and began to dig.
Her broad muscular flippers plunged and scooped
the sand—she was not made for land—
and in damp fists it slid again
into the space she’d created and again
she paddled back
to protect what her body had made.

She did not know if she would survive,
she did not wonder.

We were the ones who’d invented surviving.
We were the ones who had walked all that way holding our own shoes.
She dug and she was digging
to her own death, as it was in death that the egging began—
her body releasing the slick, living balls,
little, viscid, jelly-eyed moons,
color of light before color
they came from her
quickly and quickening,
clustering beneath her, wet, quivering,
each a world and a furtherance of the world,
as we in our wonder leaned closer, kneeling
in the sand like children.

And watching her work like that, we saw the world
we thought we lived in had been much too small.
The sky was not a woven thing.
The night was not a tablecloth scattered with salt.

Our hands that had been wet with flecks of ocean,
secret tears, secretions of boredom,
shone now with something shared.

Our toes hooked the sand and flashed
once their drying, dying stars.