Break, Crack

The break comes after the storm or day or fast or promise,

as if a promise were solid matter or the day, as if I rise (chemise-clad

and glamorous with destroyed continuity) each morning

thinking, “I am a poet,” ignoring warnings that my Google Drive

storage is nearly full, my archive of agreements unthread-bound.

Or what if I don’t rise, what if I stay in bed, mourning, wounded?

What if I don’t rise but I write the poem anyway, in any form with

breaks, complete lines, breaks as continuity, wound as tuning

fork, as turning towards all that is no longer solid. I mean I woke

up, got out of bed, stared at the never-empty street, noted the elm

and pollen coating the sidewalk, plotted various iterations of reconciliation

with mildly estranged kinsfolk, delineated one part of life from another.

No, I did not delineate. I did not curtail love from work from art.

Poems on lunch break and work on Sunday and afternoon

love before a nap and then I read an early draft version of a novel,

I made a spreadsheet of all the social media handles I at-ed 

this week for work so I never have to look them up again. 

Trevor changes the bedclothes and writes a novel. I crochet.

Somehow it’s March then April and Eid and I didn’t fast this year 

in any tradition. Jumped no fires, just awoke and made poems 

and taxonomies and pointed out a few extra commas to my direct 

report in the final_final_final3_scope_of_work. Tried to explain 

the afterlife to Desmond as “ancestors, dirt and the simultaneity of time.”

He made me a card that said, “NOOOOOOOOOO mom.” The creaky

disagreeable chair in my studio and D’s amended card to say

“I I I LOVE YOU. “Those three I’s are your past, present 

and future selves,” I tell him and he rolls his eyes. The break

is space for panic but also an attempt to get the babies to bed. 

The break is the groundless contagious chest-panic cracking

into my solar plexus. What if the Green Man climbs out of my ribs?

I’m formatting widgets on web pages and need more klonopin. 

It’s spring and a man with a foliate head is breaking from my chest.

If I’m Adam and the Green Man is the tree that grows from the seed

Adam’s son Seth plants in his dead father’s mouth as he lies in the grave, 

if I am then figure it out. I go to yoga. Coco says, “you carry your body

everywhere because ourselves is ourselves.” My children know 

the numinous multiplicity of being and likely inherited ruinous anxiety

and worldly sadness that are part reasonable coping mechanism,

part ancestral derangement and reckoning. Enough with perfection. 

Enough with these half-assed accounts. Narrative breaks enthrall and 

breaks enthrall narrative and enthralled narratives break and enthralled

breaks are sites of narration. Sites of disaster (ribs, Green-Man, panic,

remember).Resurrection is not rebirth it is just what happens. It needs

death but it would still find it even if the U.S. weren’t funding a genocide 

in Gaza to avoid any kind of accounting. But judgment day is a-coming,

and I render this account: my ancestors were regularly violent and wrong,

this recitation is meant to restore, or at least disarray and de-sequence. 

There’s no original break but it’s fun to storytell because a story about

decomposition and cracks does not serialize, does not easily don its ethics. 

I’ve read Giving An Account of Oneself three times and remember nothing

about God but the right kind of seventeenth century Protestant minister

could love Judith Butler’s work. Imagine God is always talking directly to you. Or

The Green Man is, or the mushrooms and rocks and trees are. Now don’t imagine. Listen.