What are the consolations within his blessed mercies?

Strike the empty resonance
with all the pairing opposites--
so much like all the others.

Really it would have been something
if an occasional affirmation had
loosed from any of your lips,
could have made the difference.
A burning forward at my chest
no more now than a rumor
no senses from suffering
and elemental consequences.
Heart unbroken, unresonant
like a collection of all the others.

All of them,
all these nothing, the same
as bright clean prayers
folded on paper, together
left hanging on stripped branches,
piled upon by subsequent requests
abandoned to the air.

And still, the lightness
all the space, to bear
fully the sighs in freedom

the dual chained links ever unset on my hand

Family?

So I recently read this book, title appears below the quote, and this passage below really struck me. Actually, many things in the book were particularly noteworthy. This one, I think, requires us to recast our understanding of what the term "traditional family" may actually be pointing towards.

“Although chattel slavery was under attack at the end of the eighteenth century, it belonged to a long and some thought honorable tradition. Slaves were among a crowd of dependents subject to household authority. When people today talk about assaults on the “traditional family,” they demonstrate the limits of historical memory. The medieval historian David Herlihy has explained that the English word family comes from the Latin familia, which in its earliest uses connoted “a band of slaves.” The Latin word for father, pater, has an equally complex derivation. It originally meant someone in authority, not a biological parent.
The concept of the family as an authoritarian conglomerate of unrelated persons persisted in early modern Europe. A fascinating passage in the work of the sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bpdin begins with a question: How many persons does it take to make a family? Bodin answers that it takes a master and at least three other persons, whether they be his children, slaves servants, or free dependents who have voluntarily submitted to his authority. Then, almost as an afterthought, he acknowledges that a family must also include a wife:

But for as much as Families, Colleges, Companies, Cities, and Commonweals, yea, and mankind it selfe would perish and come to an end were it not by marriages... Preserved and continued, it followeth well that a family cannot be in all points perfect and accomplished without a wife. So that by this account it cometh to passe, there must be five persons at least to make up an whole and entire family.”

P 124-5
Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History
By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich


This website entry cites some other, relevant information about the topic:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=familia&searchmode=none

Spring Thoughts (perhaps characteristically inappropriate)

So today, regardless of what the calendar says, I consider the official confirmation of Spring. First I was on a busy street in Salem and I had to stop in a long line of cars because of the great number of Canadian Geese crossing the four lane road with their babies, all of them together in a line. Usually I would be rather irritated because the geese have to stop and honk at a particular car that they are offended by, and stand and flap their wings while my timeframe for an appointment I’d like to keep is steadily expiring. But this time I took great joy in observing the fluffy, grey, and adorable babies follow their parents all bunched together with their funny backwards-oriented knees bouncing them around, able by the sheer force of their cuteness and their will to cross the street to bring a great number of adults in large, heavy cars to a standstill at the geese’s own pleasure. So I didn’t mind watching these wonderful birds bounce their way across the street. And I should add that they were crossing from the little bird park where people drive in and pull over to feed a large number of the Greater Fowl in the Mid-Willamette Valley bread crumbs and sometimes (maybe) their children. The park is just next to the busy street, and a little stream or creek runs right next to it. And on the other side of that creek, the chain link fencing and razor wire of the State Prison. On State Street and not far from our own golden-topped Capital building. On the other side of the street, the Geese’s destination, was a grassy knoll in front of the State Parks Administration or State Forestry building, you know, some government conservancy type thing or whatever. Lots of grass and nature and water running around in front of it.

Later on, I am in my Aunt’s back yard checking in on a dog and I pause to look up at a songbird. He’s got a red-flecked head and he’s quite small but making quite a mellifluous racket and at the same time exerting himself, hopping and flapping all up and down a power line. Then I noticed that he’s surrounded by a veritable harem of “chicks” spending a great amount of effort to appear as if they are completely disinterested in this vulgar display of machismo. Yet these ladies, less flagrantly colored to say the least, dowdy to say even more, were doing nothing but listen and quite brazenly judging him. It turns out that all of his activity was focused on one particular bird at the center of his hopping and flapping. How did I pinpoint the lass? Well, at a certain point he stopped flapping and flopping and alighted quite deliberately on her back, straining his wings quite rapidly and ...bouncing right on her. Which she responded with a casual shrug, causing him to reposition himself next to her. My inner Voyeur being piqued, I continued to watch them. The male bird tried again. This second time, I observed quite scientifically, the female seemed to try and steady him, as if they were acrobatic birds at the Cirque du Soleil in the center ring. (Do they have the three rings at Cirque? I’ve never been.) So then this attempt, seemingly more successful than the first, ended rather quickly and I thought, “Is that normal for birds to be so fast? ...I mean, they do have short lifespans but damn....” Then they both turned around and looked at me alternating eyes at me, first the left and then the right. Actually, I think each bird looked with a different eye, one with the left and the other with a right and then they traded, never moving except for their heads. I felt like they were saying, “WhaaaaAAAAaaaat, it’s love.” They were kind of treating me like I was their kid and I had caught them. I got the feeling that nothing was going to proceed and I could personally hold myself responsible for interrupting the continuation of the Finches if I remained. So I walked back inside, determined to write it up.

Can we deny our basic natures?

I know that they say
animals,
raging
frothing
slicing beasts
pacing over each other
in our cars
roaring down the speeding
circuits of our anger and acquisitions

I see it too,
salivating mouths, glazed-over eyes
though accidents and crises in the
television
blood and violence medicating
our empty spaces, rapacious desecrations
churning beneath our smiles,
parking spots are war zones
text and cyber messages our bullets

So have I given feed to the ferocious
withering beast
inside,
And I see they do contain their own
destructive instincts,
though dogs content themselves on dirt
and rotting things.

I know about potential

How many lives pass within my imagination?
I do not cease my fantasies--
more like me not to breathe than stop supposing
worthy empty things like
relationships and experiences.

I am the fool, the one who makes loud declarations
to empty rooms,
rather than speak to what I know.

Each morning the sun reaches
across the blue white morning,
reddening he crests the buildings beyond
my window, and drags fingers across me
starting at my feet, going--until he
offers a tiny blessing at my forehead.
He knows how to hold a person’s splendor
without burning.

Best if I go there alone

You must do what is
your wont,
but I
would not ask you
ever to go back to
that place where you
thought to
uncouple from this world--

Better not to recall
how close it felt
that I’d wake up
to find you extricated from
my life,
and pausing with the detail’s permeation
to observe the precipitant opportunities
(my head becoming a supersaturated solution
cooling to room temperature, casting down
granules of relevant insights)
of stopping your fantasies for an hour,
a duration of a cup of coffee
or a slightly shorter night's sleep.

I cannot turn from tragedy

There is a part of me in suffering
so far removed from my
everydays, almost mistaken
for a separate state entirely.

Does a day descend without your
presence--
When again the concrete integrations
of my together expectations
again particulates into windstreams,
swept along the dust-clogged avenues
of our designs?

I must bear these atrocities I
ask to turn away from;
I must watch longer the television
screen and try to participate in tragedy
not my own.

We are breathing together

Some queer thirst for your
name inspires your initials on a passing car;
your impression in place maps
and miscellaneous unintended elements
through town;
I tried to extricate every bit of you
but the very word itself,
a careless incantation and then a sharp
breath,
always in a car,
alone, driving
and your name calls me.

I am faced with an internal and also
transpersonal journey, wandering between a
wish to banish my foolishness from my waking
wanderings and never to have any more
from you,
and “I have,” I say,
though a third element in our conspirations
directs a walking tour of my museum-heart's
permanent collections

unwelcome, unbidden, and
ordained.

Disgorging the poem I owe

Warm and quick it jumped from
my open mouth displaying itself
across my sweater and guzzled down into
my fuzzy pajama bottoms.
I was left with a surprise at my
loss of bodily control, so unlike the
commands I normally issue.
Was I too young still to know when I'd
had too much
to eat?

The last time I had submitted to extreme
gastric exodus I was a skinnier 14, no longer
subject to the monthly migraines; coming home
from school pale and bleary eyed, stumbling to my
bed in the afternoon and waking up 12 hours later,
bringing up every drop of liquid in my stomach
on a seemingly 5 minute rotation. But 14, my first
week of high school in a new place,
muscle spasms in my neck, quick-sharp gasps of pain
and one ear always resting on my shoulder.
No answers from physicians, just spinal taps
and heating pads. I only learned to live with it,
but not heal it. And one night I fell asleep
with the heating pad on maximum and woke up
hours later in the early minutes of the morning,
stumbled to the carpet in my bathroom and stripped
down to nothing, delirious and in-not-pain; partially
beyond my body then.
I passed out naked on the bathroom floor,
thinking that they will find me this way in a few hours,
mom and dad and a naked dead child on the floor.
I woke up though after a few minutes, and
blew bits of carrot out my nose and my mouth,
then went to bed.
Found my carrot in a tissue the next day.

I had the Swine Flu for a week or so,
and not even with the intermittent fever dreams
of falling asleep in a convention hall with people
peering over me and talking about me in my bed,
interrupted by the brief naps with my head over the toilet,
not even then did I throw up. I said to my bubbling stomach,
"Either do it now or let me go back to sweating in my bed."

Illness does not do it anymore,
but evidently too much Miso Soup can pop my gasket.

We just change the subject

We in our conversation
try to get our points across
with the only thing reaching
between us
our disagreement;
while underneath our feet
we stand on tiny
islands.