Ash Psalms

To Dr. Oppenheimer: An Admonition in Terza Rima

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
When no angels volunteered, you found atoms were small
enough. Like God, you bent down, breathed in

and bent down to blow your breath against all
helpless things and incite them to war.
And now here I sit, meat over bones, trying to stall

another doctor with another treatment in store.
I dream of trying to saddle your harbinger horses, lost
in mushroom cloud dreams, burning houses with no doors.

Does the answer carry you closer to God? The cost
echoes, your scribblings, our fear, and between
them our neighbors’ shadows baked into walls, frost

of a different sort. I wonder if you were ever seen
walking, asking yourself where does a newmade god lay
his head to rest? I sway under the weight of medicine, lean

on the nearest wall to stay upright. It hurts. Did you ever pray
for children made angels before they had stopped breathing?
There is more to the desert than bones, stones, and sand. I say

it out loud: more than your atomfire, whirlwind and seething.
You watched behind safety glasses, far from your wife
and children, in flammable cotton, while you were unsheathing

your Hyperion error. And now, for me, this heart/painbeat, life
worried by weak men who worship with war tearing at their faces,
on rosaried knees and using your seeds to sow strife

among the living. Did you ever consider the beauty of the places
that would melt? Trees. Homes. Children on tricycles and women
kneeling in gardens, baking in kitchens, teaching sons to tie laces

on tiny shoes, enjoying the brief kind of peace rarely given
in times of war. I take my peace to the couch that holds this swing
of swollen joints in check, where I can rest the hidden

toothache in the bone that pulses to my heart, where I cling
to frayed faith on these inflamed knees. But I find my humanity
hiding in the pain, vast starry expanse with no corners. I sing

myself to sleep, I think of Syrian boys with bloody faces, insanity
perched on their shoulders, and I want to hold them, tell
those tiny tragedies that they may use all the profanity

they wish to call you by name. But you would sell
us beyond pain into damnation, dangle destruction like a gem
from your human chains, become a demigod of fire and hell.

But what did you know of pain? I wish I could tell you how I’ve found them,
shards of changeshape glass an eternity jeweled with stars within me,
and I know that this beauty of pain stains my hem.

You were not looking for the soul, or to set anyone free
from this prison of flesh, this misfiring rifle of body I find so confining
I could scream my throat to bloody ribbons. But I see

how this pain buffs the sharp edges, how it becomes a refining
flame, both distorting and purifying without reducing
or destroying. Instead of your burning rot, it becomes a defining

moment, when one slips the knot of control, lightning seducing
the nerves to all-out battle, leaving the strictest borders
of the body to the blue-limned darkness within and beyond, loosing

the soul. You did not find freedom. You took power for holy orders,
shackled civil conscience with ego-forged whitemetal chains,
to become a sky-man of might, to strike right to the heart of hoarders

of power, of all men: convinced you are no slave as long as you can tame
something smaller than yourself. You are an apocalypse. You flew
to the desert, and saw a dead space to practice your wrath. You came

to wield your weapons, measure success in meters, in how high
you could reach toward your Father’s throne, to call yourself a king,
a god, a destroyer of worlds. Practitioner of the great lie.

Power is not in melted Buicks, not in making angels cower and sing
your name in fear. There is no godhood for you, who have only sealed
your name in dust. Come lay down your flesh and I will retrieve it, the sting

of traitorous blood. Doctor, tell me what have you healed?
I can move on to Tuesday without you. Doctor, where have you laid
hands to heal that you should be carried to tomorrow, revealed

as a man who has wept, slept, slipped, been poorly equipped, and paid
a price like mine? Your scorch is no match for the greening
of my mountains after drought, no threat to my fields of flowers, laid

like carpet. You carry your old ways into new conflict, leaning
on our weakness, the pain like a lance through soft skin–
I deny you here, river and rose and rotted log all careening

to the west, calling life to life. Awake to the rattling din
I am less mist and more form as I leave you to your games.
I have learned the fecund secret you lost: this world is within

my grasp so long as I am willing to bleed for it. No airy aims
necessary, nor pretty face, no need to melt sand to glass
to declare myself to a goddess, no need to craft flames

to swallow the world. I am swallowed and swallowed and pass
through the eye of the moon beyond your sun, a long swim
past my mother’s mothers, over your blackened mass

of wreckage, and upward. Pain is a door, a way to skim
across the face of savage divinity and stay sane. It is not
an excuse to level Levittown, to blow Bradenton into a dim

past, no reason to replace the brightest star with a clot
of shadow. A hateful heart has no place in Dante’s white rose,
How, then, do I invite you in, like inviting an angry sot

to dinner at my father’s table? Not a guest I chose
but one chosen for me–too different or too alike
for comfort, souls from opposites sides of who knows

what sadistic mirror. Not that I don’t look to strike
out in my own small way, because which of us bears
an iron will? We dam it up and away until the man-made dike

breaks and we are drowned, or set aflame–your sky, my flares.
Look at us now, on opposite sides of time. Look what we build, oh,
look what we tear down. Toss your fire and sticks and stones and dares.

Bruise me but leave me tender. Infect this globe with your sickly glow.
Kindle a fire in your brother’s children, melt their marrow, every dome
in every city where men crouch. Old man, you were too young to know

such thunder never rattles Heaven, and yours is not the way home.

The Longest Kiss Goodbye

He lets his guard down lounging beside me
half-dressed and lazy, his masks in a heap
on the floor.
His honest face is a tired one.

He sleeps with one arm around me,
he sleeps well. I hold my breath
until morning so I will remember.

He never looks ashamed of himself
for anyone but me.

He does not try to prove his worth to me.
He knows I preferred him poor,
working two jobs, drinking cheap vodka
those long Kentucky summers,
our paychecks blown on Heaven Hill and fireworks.

I know why his Bible is dog-eared and brittle,
how he searches for a God he almost believes in,
unraveling each note sung as church cantor
when loosed into the neon haze of Friday night.

He spends Saturday nights with redheaded twins,
brings me to church on Sundays to suffer
old men who weep in tongues.
His eyes are on me when he sings about redemption.

My eyes never lie. His are inscrutable,
the mossy green of forest floors,
the hue of a hurricane sea.

He loves, the way the sea loves
the shore it destroys.
He kissed me, once,
when I was sick and dying,
but I lived, so he left.

At night, when his wife is asleep,
he calls to ask if I love him.
He says he married her
to see if I loved him enough
to save him from the stain of himself.

Not My Sleeping Child

Down the hallway, third door
on the left, a room I never enter
after dark. Afternoons

I clean, tuck toys onto shelves,
smooth the satin-lined blanket
into obedient corners in your

sunlit crib. But at night I do not
come to comfort your cry, fearful
of ghosts, of mothers with

foreign tongues, naming me
impostor, daring me to compare
to the power of blood.