Samhain

It was like watching a crack in the earth open, all day
it started on the phone,
“how are you”,
“mourning twelve friends massacred and more to come, more to come,
in and out of life as usual and the dropped-pit stomach of despair”

and the other glued to the news like a man on heroin,
can’t stay away from the siren call of poison
he’ll say he has sudden visions of dead bodies when we make love and so will i,
fresh out of a dream of mindless killing from the not-soldiers,
where ecstasy peels back the edges of my being and wider things flood into my consciousness
like a hiccuping tv set

and that night my head is in a fog, too many things to hold leaking through cracks,
but our busy hands settle me slowly back down,
stirring cooking pots and assembling ingredients
dried roses and bird’s wings
a cheerful riot of chrysanthemums splashing brightly in white green purple

the women putting more on the table soothe me
the pool of history between us
is a brackish water, thick with life
rebecca unfolds her red-clad grandmothers out of their passed-down cookbook, on a flimsy sheet of paper where blacks came out tinged with acid blue

you place the money plant from your father’s heritage,
the ali baba cave where you grew among money-making grimoires, citrines and golden things and stashes of bills planted around the house,
we watch the video of his body burning under spiralling smokes in all colors of the rainbow, shockingly cheerful like laughter or puppies or a flowered scent can banish death with the authority of minor gods,
the smoke swerves in technicolor glee and life dances on

then we peer into moving faces of distant friends, squeezed stamp-small on screen
and someone is crying cause they’re, surprise! - pregnant
and alon ducks out to check because there’s another bomb alert
and another has the honeymoon glow of a new sex-worker on her face,

and in the dizzying waves of information i feel some kind of oracular haze
where the spotlight cranks on through the fog and i see it clearly
that everything i’ve been struggling to contain,
to bend towards or shrink from
is absolutely equal,
i’m being asked to simply
widen,

widen my capacity to embrace it all
the news I refuse to watch and the bullshit theme of entropy I don’t believe,
the big dreams of buying land together suddenly approach with booming giant steps

and to let also the close, so-warm closeness flow through like uncaught fish
let it trickle past like the tears dripping down their faces as they say
“i have no one,
no one like you around me
with such presence listening and fire,
that know me without the need for a single word”

it comes like a hungover epiphany, to take it all in
like some virgin wakes full of the seed of god
(do any of us ever ask for it?)

the bigger picture hovers multi-dimensional
and invites me to look at the descending broader vision

whose time has come.